


The Long Way Around

by inwardtransience



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Female Harry Potter, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:42:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28324026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inwardtransience/pseuds/inwardtransience
Summary: Beth's ill-advised jaunt into the Department of Mysteries goes badly, because of course it does. She ends up accidentally causing a weird magical chain-reaction and getting herself tossed a thousand years into the past, because OF COURSE she does. At this point, she's not even surprised anymore. That's just her luck, isn't it?
Relationships: Harry Potter & Helga Hufflepuff, Harry Potter & Hermione Granger
Comments: 34
Kudos: 101





	1. 1996 — The Department of Mysteries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god, why is this even a thing...
> 
> Notes at the end of the second chapter. See you then.

Hermione had been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since the Atrium.

She'd expected the Ministry offices wouldn't have much in the way of activity, of course — it had to be nearly midnight by now, and on normal days the Ministry was supposedly closed for business around seven. There were exceptions, though. It wasn't unusual for a few people to be stuck dealing with one matter or another long into the night. According to Mr Weasley, there were always a few people in the office, doing research or writing up reports or inching their way through backed-up paperwork, even after official business hours the Ministry never truly slept.

And then there was the Department of Law Enforcement, they obviously never shut down completely. Adjustment was always running, twenty-four hours every day of the year, since magical incidents endangering Secrecy hadn't the consideration to constrain themselves to business hours. According to Tonks this time, things often didn't quiet down at the DLE until nearly two in the morning — that was when the evening shift change finally happened, the officers on duty reduced to the minimum of a single trio of Aurors and a couple Hit Wizard teams (plus associated administrative staff). It shouldn't be that late yet, so there should still be over a hundred people in the DLE, perhaps as many as two hundred including Adjustment.

But the Atrium had been still, and quiet, and dark.

And there hadn't been any security at the gates.

Hermione had already been uneasy about all this. And well she should be — charging off to the Ministry in the middle of the night to rescue Sirius from Voldemort was an absolutely mad thing to do. But then, Beth did absolutely mad things on the regular. The best Hermione could do, she'd learned, was to tag along and provide some modicum of sense for Beth, in an effort to hopefully keep her reckless, impulsive best friend alive. She was never happy about it, she didn't take to going on these mad escapades the way Ron did — sometimes, she couldn't help feeling he was encouraging Beth to engage in insane (awesome) heroics, sometimes she just wanted to slap him whenever he opened his mouth — but what else could she do?

This time, this time was a whole new level of reckless. Hermione had tried to draw attention to the fact that Voldemort was hardly likely to, just, walk into the Department of Mysteries on some random day, especially alone — if he were to do such a thing, surely he'd have a Death Eater escort. Sirius was hardly likely to be out somewhere he'd be captured, either — not to mention, he was also one hell of a fighter, if he'd been discovered he would have been able to fight off pretty much anyone long enough to escape. And, wasn't the whole reason Beth was supposed to be learning occlumency that Voldemort might discover their connection and send her false visions? Yes, the one about Mr Weasley had been real, and thank God for that, but they'd known the Order had eyes on the entrance of the Department of Mysteries, so that had been plausible. This one...

Hermione was convinced this was a trap. She'd ended up going along with it anyway, because it'd been clear there was no way to convince Beth otherwise and Hermione wasn't about to let her go off and do something this completely stupid on her own. But it was almost certainly a trap.

Of course, that didn't mean Voldemort would actually be waiting for them down there, or any Death Eaters. It was possible Voldemort just wanted Beth to break into the Ministry and get caught — with the way the Ministry had been going lately, Hermione wouldn't be surprised if they just tossed Beth into Azkaban and asked questions never. (And he'd already proven he could get into Azkaban, he could just walk up and throw a Killing Curse between the bars of her cell and that would be that.) Dumbledore probably wouldn't let that happen, but...

The point was, Hermione hadn't been happy about this in the first place. When she noticed there was no security at the gate, that just made her more anxious. Because there definitely should be. Even if the Ministry was entirely empty (which it never was), there were still sensitive documents all over the place in here, things they didn't want just anyone to waltz in and mess around with. The entrance should never be left unattended, there were always a few Hit Wizards on duty.

Beth, Hermione, Ron, Neville, Ginny, and Luna just...walked right in, through the Atrium and down into the Department of Mysteries. Nobody challenged them. Even into the Department itself — through the ridiculous spinning room, peeking in on the room with the floating brains (what the hell), the creepy damn old archway, and finally through the room with all the clocks. (Hermione had known the Department of Mysteries made the time-turners, she hadn't been surprised to find such a place.) And then through the huge, almost cathedral-like hall, the only light from a few glowing orbs and the tips of their wands.

Following Beth through the shadowy rows of shelves, Hermione's heart was in her throat the whole time, her breath thin and and tense — not because she truly expected to find Voldemort waiting for them in row ninety-seven, though even Beth was starting to get twitchy and awkward, avoiding their eyes, her own doubts growing. (If nothing else, they should have heard something a while ago.) No, she was still convinced this was a trap. She was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for everything to go wrong, any second now...

She'd almost been glad Ron had pointed out the label under one of the glass balls, that it had Beth's name on it. If nothing else, it would serve as a distraction from her growing discomfort — Beth was becoming visibly ashamed of herself for wasting their time, for running off without thinking, for whatever might happen when they returned to Hogwarts. (Nothing good, probably.) Which was premature, the trap hadn't been sprung yet. And then Beth had to go reaching for the thing.

"Beth, no! I don't think you should touch that." She wasn't sure why — beyond not knowing what the hell it was, and touching unidentified glowing magical objects generally being a bad idea. Unsurprisingly, Neville and Ginny also said Beth should leave it...

...but, also unsurprisingly, Beth ignored them all, grabbed the ball and plucked it off the shelf. Hermione held her breath, her teeth painfully clenched, waiting for– for something to happen. She didn't know what, but it could be anything — it could be cursed, for all they knew! She waited, for several seconds, but...nothing. Nothing happened, the mysterious glass ball just continued to glow and be generally odd and mysterious.

Okay, then.

"Very good, Potter. Now turn around, nice and slowly, and give that to me."

Her eyes dropping closed, Hermione bit out a sigh. And that would be the trap. She glanced down one side of the hall and then — her entire body pounding in a single hard thrill, almost painful — the other side. They were surrounded. Figures in black, trousers and tunics meant for dueling shrouded with heavy cloaks, their faces covered with shining silver masks, a dozen lit wands fixed on the six of them. Not Unspeakables. Not Hit Wizards.

Death Eaters.

Great. That was just great. They were out-numbered two to one, by adults — dangerous, deadly brownshirt adults — and they were surrounded. She hoped Beth had a brilliant idea, because Hermione had nothing.

But, bafflingly, they didn't attack. Beth demanded to know where Sirius was, the lack of actual anger on her voice and the way she glanced around suggested she was just giving herself time to think, the Death Eaters taunting her in return. Lord Malfoy, Hermione recognised his voice, and the unnervingly mad-sounding woman, probably Bellatrix Lestrange, spoke for the Death Eaters, the others only chuckling occasionally, muttering to each other. They confirmed the vision had been fake — under the circumstances, Hermione couldn't really feel pleased she'd been right the whole time.

"Now, give me the prophecy, or we'll have to move on to...less pleasant methods."

"Go on, then." Under the edge of fear on her voice — for the rest of them, probably, Beth was irritatingly cavalier about her own safety at the best of times — Beth almost sounded... Was she taunting the bloody magic Nazis? What the hell was she doing?

Swallowing down her own terror as best as she could (which she wasn't bad at, by now), Hermione raised her own wand as Beth did, targeting the dark figure she suspected was Lestrange. She noticed in her peripheral vision Ron was aiming the other way with Beth and Luna, Ginny and Neville with Hermione — it looked like Neville was targeting Lestrange too, not surprised.

Hermione waited for the Death Eaters to do something, or for Beth to curse first, but...nothing happened. Long, tense seconds, and nothing.

"Hand over the prophecy," Malfoy drawled, "and nobody need get hurt." His voice sounded less smooth, less amused than before, almost...annoyed.

Beth snorted. "And I give you this...prophecy, you called it? I give it over, and you'll just let us skip off home, will you?"

Oh good, Beth hadn't entirely taken leave of her senses...

Watching Lestrange, Hermione saw a flicker of her wand, tensed in anticipation, and then realised at the last second that was a summoning charm. Hermione started casting her own, preparing to snatch the ball (prophecy?) out of the air as it flew past her, and—

A swirl of her wand, a pale shield charm sprung into existence around Beth — she fumbled the ball for a second, but managed to keep hold of it. "Nice try, Lestrange, I'm not that stupid."

Lestrange giggled. (Because that wasn't unsettling at all.) "Oh, the little baby Potter thinks she knows how to play? Very well, then..."

"No, Bellatrix. If she smashes it..."

Lestrange scoffed, clicked her tongue. "Fine, fine. It's to be persuasion, then. Travers — take the little one."

Her breath froze in her throat, ice trailing up her spine. Like Lestrange, Cyrus Travers was one of the more infamous Death Eaters from the first war — he had a particular penchant for murdering women and girls, sometimes very young girls, most often torturing them (raping them) for hours first. (Susan's mother had been one of his victims, she'd been on a hair-trigger rage for a whole two weeks after the Azkaban breakout.) The others apparently recognised the name too, gasping and cursing, and their group shuffled around without a word or glance of communication. After a couple seconds, before the Death Eaters had hardly moved, Luna and Ginny were at the middle of their group, flanked by Beth, Ron, Neville, and Hermione — Neville needed someone on this side with him, and Hermione could hardly be the little one.

While they reorganised themselves, Beth called, "You hurt any of them, and I'll smash this thing." Hermione glanced that way quick, to see she'd raised the prophecy above shoulder level, ready to chuck against the ground, her wand poised to throw up a shield on an instant's notice. "I don't think your boss will be too happy about you then, will he?"

The Death Eaters stopped moving, instantly. For long seconds, they all glared at each other in silence.

Then they went back to talking. Hermione could tell by how unfocused Beth sounded, distracted, that she was still wildly trying to come up with a plan — though it was subtle enough people who weren't familiar with her probably wouldn't notice. In the brief conversation — Beth continued to taunt them through the whole thing, because of course she did (Bellatrix even threw a hex at her, though Malfoy himself intercepted it) — Malfoy explained that the glass ball Beth was holding contained a recording of a prophecy made during the last war involving Voldemort, that this prophecy was, in fact, the reason Voldemort had attacked the Potters on Hallowe'en in the first place.

Hermione almost felt like rolling her eyes. A prophecy, really? Ugh. Even if this prophecy thing actually existed, and if divination weren't a total crock of shite, even Hermione knew enough about divination to know that you wouldn't— Acting on prophecies was never a good idea, and more often than not caused them to come to pass, and normally not to one's benefit. Honestly, hadn't Voldemort ever read the Iliad, or Oedipus Rex? This was basic stuff, honestly...

Beth, with more subtlety than Hermione would honestly expect her to be capable of, got Malfoy to keep talking (mostly things Hermione had figured out already). After a couple minutes, she felt one of the younger girls shift behind her, coming up close. "Shelves." She blinked, glanced around them, down at the remains of two glass balls knocked off the shelves by Malfoy and Lestrange's hexes a moment ago. They had been rather noisy when they'd fallen, the crashing and skittering of glass, two figures rattling off nonsense dramatic-sounding—

Oh, a distraction. She got it.

Hermione was temporarily distracted when Beth guessed Sturgis and Bode (arrested and deceased respectively) had been compelled to try to get the prophecy for Voldemort — she hadn't put that together herself but it was obvious in retrospect, and really should have been obvious to Dumbledore, and if nothing else should have been a signal for the Ministry to take security here more seriously, but...

Beth got Malfoy and Lestrange to start arguing again — which wasn't difficult, she just taunted Lestrange into nearly cursing her again by calling Voldemort "Tommy". While the Death Eaters were bickering, she hissed, "Now!" and cast a blasting curse into the shelves. The rest of them were only an instant behind, Hermione aiming at the shelf just next to them, the direction the door was in. And she wasn't the only one, Ron's, Luna's, and her own curse struck in nearly the same spot, the combined power of the spells shredding the material four shelves high and a metre wide, the whole thing teetering from the force, more of the prophecies tipping off the edge to smash against the floor, dozens of ghostly figures and groaning voices overlapping—

"Don't touch the glass!" Hermione moved to cast a basic repelling barrier over their heads, but noticed Beth had beaten her to it, the shimmering dome flaring brighter as Neville next to her added his own. Ron and Ginny were already moving toward the hole they'd blasted into the shelves, the Death Eaters closing in — but not casting, they might hit Beth and accidentally break the prophecy they were after — Hermione cast a wide-angled banishing, a half-dozen falling prophecies shot into the pack of Death Eaters, smashing against their robes.

One of them broke into an eerie, guttural, gurgling scream — he shouldn't have touched the glass.

They slipped through the hole in the shelves, whole prophecies and the occasional shard bouncing off the dome over their heads, Ron and Ginny were through first, then Neville, Hermione, Beth. Luna was nearly out when an arm wrapped around her from behind, all their wands turned that way and Beth—

Despite herself, Hermione gaped for a second in disbelief — Beth punched the Death Eater in the face, cast a stunning charm over Luna's shoulder (followed immediately by four more from the rest of them, carefully aimed through the gap in the shelves) while pulling Luna the rest of the way through by a fistfull of her jumper. Neville caught her before she could fall, Ron and Ginny were already carving a path through the next shelf, Hermione shot off a couple banishing charms on the shelves, up several metres toward the top, the whole thing tipping over further, quicker as Beth started doing the same.

There was a heavy grinding and splintering, a hundred of the little balls slipping out and crashing to the floor all at once, as this row slammed into the next, the thin shelves and posts cracking and crumbling under the weight. The Death Eaters were yelling, somebody had set the falling row of shelves on fire — which was only making the destruction and chaos worse, so thanks for that — two Death Eaters were trying to slip through the gap, one was hit by a disarming hex from Beth, quickly followed by a bludgeoning hex from Hermione, pushing them back through as the whole thing came collapsing down.

Through the noise, Hermione heard another unnerving scream, a second Death Eater getting cursed by the raining glass. Assuming those two buried in shelving and the one Beth had stunned were out of the fight, they were down from twelve Death Eaters to eight. Not bad.

(Hermione tried not to think about the fact that at least two of them were permanently injured.)

By the time Hermione ducked through into the next row, they'd already finished blasting a hole into the one after. "Maïa!" She turned at the shout of her name, scrambled to catch the prophecy — instinctively, she wasn't thinking, fear flaring through her head to toe after it was already too late, the smooth, warm glass landing in her hands. But, thankfully, she didn't get cursed, it must have broken when Beth picked it up. Which was obvious when she thought about it, presumably Malfoy didn't want to get cursed by the thing. It took a little bit of effort to wedge it into one of the magically-enhanced pockets in her denims — she'd stitched expansion charms into the cloth with silver thread, Runes class was dead useful — but just because it was so wide across, once she had it through it fit just fine, showing no hint she was carrying anything at all.

Which Beth would have known before handing the thing to her — the Death Eaters would probably guess they still had it, but they wouln't be able to tell who. Beth might never be a good student, but she was very clever.

Through into the next row, they knocked down the shelving they'd just slipped through, tipping it over onto the mess they'd already made, as it fell running down the length of the row, firing off more blasting curses, setting the shelves on fire here and there. Two robed figures appeared in head of them, Hermione levitated a few shards of glass on the floor up, transfigured them longer and pointier even as stunning charms lanced out, one was downed and the other shielded, but not a shield meant for physical projectiles, her glass shards slipped right through, and a third Death Eater went down screaming.

"Bloody hell, 'Mione," Ron gasped as they rounded the corner, jumping over the prophecy-cursed Death Eater — Luna stunned the man as she went by, cutting off his writhing and moaning. "You're fecking scary, you know that?"

Hermione grimaced, trying not to feel guilty. They were members of an organisation seeking to wipe people like herself out of existence, it was just self-defence...

"Fucking brilliant, you mean!" She rather wished Ginny wouldn't sound so indecently gleeful about it.

They charged off down the hall, still throwing blasting and fire charms in all directions, Hermione and Beth casting occasional trap hexes here and there on the floor behind them. There were shifting shapes far away in the darkness that might have been pursuers, but by the time they reached the door back into the time-turner room there was nobody in sight. All six of them swept inside, Beth slamming the door behind them, Hermione hitting it with a sealing charm — one of the ones that physically bound the door to the frame, so unlocking charms wouldn't work. That shouldn't be visible from the opposite side...she didn't think.

All of them took a quick moment to catch their breath — red-faced and sweaty, a few of them had scratches on their arms from forcing their way through the shelves, Neville badly enough he was bleeding from multiple places, but nobody was badly injured. Somehow, bloody miracle...

But they couldn't be that far behind. "We have to... We have to get out of here."

Beth nodded, gestured toward the door on the opposite side of the room. "The spinning room should be just there."

"It's a long straight shot to the lifts," Ron said, frowning.

"I'm sorry, you know another way out of here?"

"I'm just thinking Hermione should have kept some of that glass. That shite's effective."

Neville let out a breathless, nervous laugh.

They started across the room, looping around the large basin in the middle. Made of a pure white marble, maybe three metres wide and higher than her waist, the thing was filled with what Hermione recognised as sands of time — there had been a few grams of it in the hourglass at the centre of her time-turner. There was far more than a few grams of it here, the entire basin was filled with the stuff, little crystals glinting in the light. Almost like quartz, but with an unnatural purplish cast to it, blue and orange, shimmering silver reflections thrown back and forth, enough it almost seemed to faintly glow. The sands weren't perfectly stable, a transparent containment field was cast over the whole basin, the air within smeared with hints of colour, like reflections on oil.

It was pretty, if...subtly unnerving. There was just something off about the stuff, even if Hermione couldn't quite put her finger on what. Beyond the fact that it was time itself somehow alchemised into physical grains, something that should not exist, that part should be obvious.

Halfway across the room, they all jumped at a thump against the door behind them. Beth hissed, "Down," they all ducked behind one of the desks scattered across the room. Hermione and Beth had been at the back, she tried to look across the room from under her desk, but she couldn't see much of anything — the next desk over, the basin of impossible sand nearby, bits of the walls...

After a couple tense seconds, there was an almighty crash, followed by a heavy clang — someone had blasted the door off its hinges. Hermione held her breath, listening.

"Straight through, you think?"

"Assuming they know the exit is that way."

"Worth looking. Check under the desks."

"Stupeat!" That was Beth — hopefully she'd actually hit one of them, breaking their cover. There were a few more shouted spells, but Hermione couldn't bloody see anything. She rolled over, kicked the leg of her desk, sliding out from behind it on her back—

And there was a Death Eater right there, stepping out from a desk he must have ducked behind for a second. His mask was cracked, probably by a falling shelf or a bludgeoning hex, what Hermione could see of his face clenched with rage. He spotted her, his wand was already aimed, "Animam exp—"

"Exc—" Even as she said it she knew it was too late, he was a few syllables ahead of her.

She was about to die.

"—ed-yaaahh!" The Death Eater's robes suddenly burst into flames, the instant before he could get the lethal curse off. He flailed for a second, before he could put out the fire a flaring yellow-white curse hit him, and he was flung back, slammed into a desk hard enough the wood splintered under him. Hermione was certain she'd heard bones snap. Though he was still burning, the flames spreading to the shards of the desk around him, the man didn't move.

Hermione sucked in a shaky breath — that was far too close.

(Also, she was pretty sure Beth had just killed him. She was honestly surprised by how much she did not care.)

She pushed herself up to her feet, shaky with adrenaline, ducked again as spells shot over her head. There was still a Death Eater, there, only a few metres away through the desks — either Beth had missed, or the other one had revived him right away. Hermione shot off a blasting curse, but she missed badly, her hand shaking too much. A spell of crackling green lightning sliced across the air, a Killing Curse, where was it— Ginny! A flick of Hermione's wand, a desk lifted up into the air, then exploded into flying shrapnel when the curse hit it — Ginny was knocked off her feet, but she would live.

A few more spells flew in at the Death Eater from behind her, he ducked behind cover, Beth hopped up onto a desk a bit to Hermione's left, aimed a nasty piercing hex down at the man's head. Hermione could hear him swearing from here, he quick slapped Beth's curse out of the way, hitting a desk behind him instead, carving a hole six inches wide through the wood. The man shot off two blue spellglows, Hermione ducked but they weren't aimed at her, a jab and the desk Beth had been on burst into bright yellow flame, but she'd already hopped away onto another one, Hermione cast a strong bludgeoning hex, not at the man but the desk in front of him, the curses the man had cast a second ago caused a lot of noise and yelling behind her but she didn't hear any screaming, the desk she'd hit was ripped off the floor and slammed into the Death Eater, his breath came out in a strangled cough, Beth cast a severing curse down at him, he banished the desk off of him, rolling down to the side, a pair of stunning spells from behind her passing through where his head had been a second ago, Beth's severing curse sliced the flying desk in half but it was still flying right at her, she skipped out of the way, leaping onto another desk, cursing through gritted teeth—

A gleaming white spellglow shot through the air, coming in just to Hermione's left — it wasn't aimed at anyone, probably a high-intensity blasting curse of some kind. She cast a repelling barrier, angled between herself and where the curse was about to land. It hit like a bomb, one of the desks just completely incinerated, the stone floor under it crumbling, a shockwave thudding through the room, wind pulling at Hermione's hair around her barrier. A wide-angle fire spell on her lips, she turned and—

Froze. When the blasting curse had hit, Beth had been standing on one of the desks on the edge of the row, right next to the basin. The force of the explosion had pushed her desk back, tipped over, Beth was teetering back, stumbling off the desk, falling through the containment field...

...into the sands.

Hermione dropped her fire charm, brought her wand around to summon Beth out, but she was too late, she wasn't going to make it. Through the mess of her hair, vibrant red-orange curls flying around her head, Hermione caught the expression on Beth's face, surprise collapsing into determination, her eyes narrowed, jaw set. She yanked her arms in, twisting, leading with her shoulder — apparating, she was going to apparate out.

Beth's foot sank into the basin.

There was a harsh crack of inexpertly-performed apparation, and Beth blinked out of existence.

Before the crack had even faded entirely, there was a quick series of popping noises, a crackling of electricity. The rainbow swirls in the containment field contorted, twisting around, drawn toward a single point like water circling the drain, a thin trail of shimmering purple sand drawn up in a spiral, then quickly thickening, like a dust devil—

There were more popping noises, bright white light given off with each one, Hermione winced, shielding her eyes. The column of spinning sands thickening and thickening, there was another quick series of pops, another crack, and Beth had reappeared exactly where she'd left, her figure oddly blurred and the colours oversaturated, just for an instant before, with a loud squealing noise, like steel being torn apart, a blinding flare of purple-white light—

The ground shook under her feet, her hip knocking painfully against a desk, a cabinet against the wall toppled and crashed to the floor, dozens of little gold time-turners skittering across the ground, Hermione couldn't see inside the basin, still shining far too brightly to look at directly, but the air all around it seemed to undulate, wobbling back and forth, ephemeral trails of multicoloured light whirling around stretching out around it...

...into the room — the containment field had broken.

"Run! Get away from it, run!"

"But Beth was—!"

"No, move, go!" The others slipped through the desks, moving toward the door on the left, Neville (his clothes striped with char) and Ginny (half of her hair burned away) dragging Ron (cuts from shrapnel littering his left arm) along despite his struggling, flailing and yelling for Beth. There was another high squeal from the basin, Hermione's steps hitched, suddenly feeling impossibly heavy, the vortex in the sands drawing her in.

A spellglow shot over Luna's head to slam into the wall, the Death Eater's aim wide. Hermione glanced over her shoulder, spotted him behind her, closer to the basin and clearly struggling to keep moving. She paused, planting her feet against the pull, plucked another desk off the ground to send it flying in at the Death Eater from the side. He tried to dodge but he stumbled, the vortex pulling him off balance, and the desk crashed into him, shoving him onto his arse and closer to the basin—

The squealing noise was constant now, bands of colour sweeping across the room, the light in the middle only growing brighter, Hermione finally reached the others huddled near the door, Neville and Ginny had shield charms up, Luna was scrambling to transfigure desks into a physical barrier, an uncharacteristic anxious scowl on her face, Ron had stopped struggling, but wasn't casting, his hand shaking too much, barely holding back tears, he couldn't breathe to cast anything. Hermione helped Luna, since it wasn't like she needed incantations to do transfiguration, it didn't matter that her chest was burning, her throat clenched so tight it ached, she—

"It's too big!" Luna yelled. She grabbed Ginny by the shoulder, turned to the exit. "Through the door now or we die!" She sounded remarkably confident about that, but Ginny did claim the odd little girl was a Seer, so...

The girls were through first, then Neville and Ron, the former dragging the latter by the elbow, Ron shouting something about not leaving Beth behind. Hermione gave him a hard shove with her off hand, firming up their barricade with a last couple bits of conjuration, turned around to slip through the door and—

The piercing squeal coming from behind — as though the sands were tearing a hole into the universe, the fabric of reality itself noisily protesting — suddenly cut out with a deep, bone-shivering shockwave, reverberating in Hermione's chest hard enough her breath was stolen, something heavy slammed into her back and she was thrown off her feet. She crashed into something — Ron or Neville, probably — a glancing hit, the impact not really hurting but tipping her into a spin, an instant later she hit something hard, levering her over the hip, her momentum carrying her over and—

A dull, heavy pain in her head, an echo carrying through her, and the world went grey and numb.

For a time, Hermione couldn't begin to guess how long, she floated in a sort of distant half-consciousness, everything hurt, like a bludger had gone to town on her for a couple minutes, it felt like the ground was tilting and spinning under her, nausea starting to rise, her ears stuffed with cotton, sound a muffled, unidentifiable wall.

Before long, the noise started to resolve as the crackles and bursts of spellfire, she could feel her fingers again. There were voices, she recognised them as voices, she could pick out the sounds just fine, but for some reason they didn't make sense, just random noise and not words at all...

Until suddenly they were. "—up, Hermione, please wake up..." Ron, that was Ron.

"'m fine." With some effort, Hermione forced her eyes open, winced, the yellowish light filling wherever they were stabbing into her skull. But she kept them open anyway...not that it did much good, the image dizzily spinning down and to the right, it was hard to make out much. One arm blindly reaching in what she was pretty sure was Ron's direction, she said, "Help me up."

"Er, maybe you shouldn't be moving..."

"I'm fine, Neville, just dizzy." Well, she wasn't fine, really, she did still hurt, she was going to have bruises bloody everywhere tomorrow, but she didn't think anything was broken. A hand found hers, another at her elbow, and Ron helped her sit up.

Which just made the spinning worse. Hermione squeezed her eyes shut.

"—need a healer, think we can flag one of them down?"

"What? Is someone...?" Oh, she must have blacked out for a second. Her head did really fucking hurt, the world was still spinning, and everything was too damn bright. Must be post-traumatic amnesia, then — she had a concussion. Great. Everything had gone very fuzzy for a moment there, but she didn't think she'd actually lost consciousness, or at least not completely, so it shouldn't be that bad. As long as she didn't get hit in the head again any time soon, she'd be fine.

Or get cursed, she guessed. She was looking out into the room, the amphitheatre with the creepy archway, and there was a bloody battle going on in here, several Death Eaters — more than there should be, she thought, they must have had reinforcements waiting — and a couple dozen people in the black and red and blue of Aurors and Hit Wizards. They were moving around so fast, far too many blinding flashes of spellglows, Hermione couldn't tell what was going on really, not to mention everything was still bloody spinning. She was pretty sure the Death Eaters were losing, though. At the very least, they did appear to be outnumbered. That was...good. That was good.

No, nothing was good. Beth had– she—

She was gone. Whatever that magical chain reaction was, it'd been bad enough for Hermione some distance from it, and Beth had been in the middle of it, she—

"—think it's broken, but other than that, I think we're fine."

"What?" Hermione turned back to her friends, glanced between them (trying not to notice how nauseous looking around was making her). Oh, injuries, right, she'd been confused what they wanted a healer for (herself, obviously), Ron must have been telling her how everyone was. There were a few more scratches here and there, everyone was going to be awfully bruised up tomorrow, but the only new thing (she thought) was that Neville was cradling his wrist, his face pulled into a pained grimace — he had broken his wrist before, probably remembered what it felt like.

Of course, because he was Neville, he groaned through his teeth, "Are you sure you're okay, Hermione?"

"Yes, I think so." At least, she was pretty sure that hadn't been another black out — inattention and confusion were more symptoms. "I have a con– concussion, that's all."

Hermione got four very doubtful frowns. Which was quite silly, concussions weren't really that big of a deal for mages — they tended to heal very quickly just on their own, and magic was much better than medicine at healing brain damage. (Though any memories lost were gone for good, obviously.) She even had a couple potions in one of her expanded pockets that would help, but she didn't trust herself to be able to identify the correct one by sight at the moment. A little short-sighted, perhaps, but she'd planned for other people getting injured, not herself...

Or maybe they just found the symptoms a bit unnerving. If she was coming off particularly absent and confused, she supposed she might seem very much not like herself, she could understand how the others might find that worrying. But, really, she'd be fine.

(She was not fine — Beth was gone.)

The fight in the big ampitheatre-like room — they were a couple tiers of benches down from one of the side doors, Hermione must have hit her head tumbling down here — was still going on, the five of them pretty much ignored by both sides, thankfully. Presumably the Death Eaters still wanted their prophecy, but they were rather too occupied to bother with them at the moment. Even as Hermione watched, the Death Eaters started to pull away from their various little duels, making for the doors, the Aurors and Hit Wizards (and several people in civilian dress, the Order?) practically tripping over themselves trying to follow — the Death Eaters were retreating.

Hermione pushed herself to her feet, and immediately teetered to her right, she would have fallen over if Ron didn't catch her. "Woah, Hermione, settle down, we should—"

"We have to go after them."

"There isn't—"

"We can't let them get away. We can't."

It was a mad thing to say, especially since Hermione could hardly even see straight at the moment — what the hell was she supposed to do that half the DLE couldn't? But Ron didn't argue, his fingers tightening with anger, his voice thick with grief. "Fine. You have a plan?"

She didn't, really, but she couldn't just sit here watching the room spin around her and do nothing.

With stumbling, awkward steps, Ron or Ginny catching her now and again when she teetered too far, Hermione started across the amphitheatre, into the circular room with all the doors and the spinning. Thankfully, multiple doors were hanging open, so it wasn't going to start moving on them, and the flashes of spellfire made it obvious which way they were supposed to be going. She must have had another brief black out, because she didn't actually remember making it to the hallway, but they were still moving and nobody said anything, so she must have kept walking like normal.

There were stairs down a side hall from the lifts, several Hit Wizards in the hall, firing spells up through the door — the Death Eaters must be taking the stairs together, instead of splitting up to take the lifts. So, it seemed the obvious thing to do was take one of the lifts up themselves. Hermione stumbled in first, leaned against the back wall to rest. Despite not actually doing much, she was weirdly out of breath, her limbs twitching.

Before long, the doors opened out into the Atrium. There was clearly a battle going on here too, the air shuddering with one shockwave after another, powerful mages clashing, debris clattering against the floor, the occasional flare of fire or crackle of lightning. Sounded like a hell of a fight, whatever that was.

Ginny started moving, but Luna stopped her by the elbow. Pointing her wand out the door, she said, smooth and calm, "Five. Four."

Er...okay, then. Luna apparently wasn't even pretending to be a normal person anymore. Shaking off how very odd it was for the (very odd) girl to know exactly when the Death Eaters would be going by, Hermione obediently raised her wand, all five of them aiming blindly out into the Atrium.

"Two. One. Stupeat." A pack of eight or so Death Eaters had just come into sight, charging out into the Atrium from their left.

"Stupeat!" "Excide!" "Distona!" "Stupeat!"

Hermione jumped at the growl of an incantation from Ron — that curse was extremely lethal, if it landed whoever was hit with it would almost certainly die, even if a healer got to them immediately. It wasn't quite so irreversible as the Killing Curse, the damage just caused enough bleeding it was all but impossible to stop in time. It was one of the spells Sirius had taught Beth over the summer, she'd passed it on to just a tiny handful of trusted people, repeating his warning to only ever cast this one anywhere near a person if they wanted the target dead. (It had reminded Hermione of basic gun safety stuff, actually.)

He probably did want them dead. Beth was—

She understood, was the point. Hers wasn't exactly a schoolyard jinx either.

Five spellglows lanced out, three the bright red of stunners, one a sharp yellow-orange, another a wide arc of a pale blue-white, reaching the pack of Death Eaters more or less in sync, Luna's hex slightly ahead and Neville's slightly behind. The first stunner hit one of the figures in the lead, he collapsed limply to the floor, Ginny's slipped straight through the group without hitting any of them, Ron's curse struck one just above the hip — a portion of the figure's torso dissolving in a blink, dark specks poofing out and falling to the floor like ash, the Death Eater fell screaming next to his severed leg, blood quickly pooling — Hermione's curse landed an instant later — a figure in the centre of the arc took it full in the chest, cutting them down (and possibly through) the bone, one to the left was clipped across the shoulder (superficial damage), one to the right got a shield up in time — and then Neville's stunner came in, but it was caught on a shield charm.

The Death Eaters reacted instantly, pivoting as a group to fling spells in retaliation. Hermione let herself go limp, throwing up a shield charm as she fell; the rest dropped too, Ginny yanked the doors closed with a flick of her wand, Neville and Luna both cast a barrier. The grate caught at least two spells that had no effect, probably needed a body to act on properly (one she recognised as the Unforgiveable torture curse), then was struck by a severing curse and then a blasting curse, weakening it and then smashing it into pieces — the barrier spells sent the shrapnel skittering away, she didn't think any of them were hit. In the next instant, Hermione's shield flared and brinked out, by the blinding flash of light and the boom of thunder a lightning curse of some kind, but it didn't reach into the lift, her shield charm had done its job. Then a pair of Killing Curses sailed through, smashed into the wall of the lift just where Hermione had been standing a moment ago — the repelling barrier was angled forward, bits of ice-cold wood and metal rained down on Hermione, but the impacts were light, they shouldn't even bruise.

Before the Death Eaters could send a second volley they were being joined by several more of their fellows, spells raining down on them from behind. Reviving charms were cast at all the downed men — two of them, the ones hit by Ron's curse and the centre of Hermione's, stayed down — and they continued further into the Atrium, by the time Hermione finally managed to push herself up to her shaky feet (with Ron's help) Aurors and Hit Wizards were already running by.

They followed after the figures in red and blue cloaks, Hermione limping along leaning on Ron, trying to walk just made the spinning worse. The Ministry people (and probable Order allies) were still firing off curses at the fleeing Death Eaters, but she couldn't see much, certainly couldn't aim around them to help. She couldn't do anything.

She hadn't done anything. Beth had fallen in, and Hermione had just stood there, and—

(She was gone, she couldn't believe Beth was gone...)

They came up short, Hermione stumbling enough she nearly fell again, when the Aurors and Hit Wizards petered to a halt, only a few metres into the Atrium proper. At a glance, clinging to Ron's clothes and yanking herself up onto her toes, the Death Eaters had stopped too, clumping up near the wall between here and the fireplaces out. Everyone had gone still, looking into the middle of the Atrium, casting shields and conjured barriers, but not facing each other, instead out, as though expecting incoming fire from...

Oh. Hermione had been focusing so intently on the fleeing Death Eaters, she hadn't even noticed at first who was in the middle of the Atrium.

Voldemort.

But he wasn't alone — the Dark Lord was in the middle of a duel, with a single figure it looked like. Hermione couldn't see much from here, just an occasional flicker of motion over the others' heads — she'd heard Voldemort could fly unassisted, but apparently this other person could too — flashes of light now and again, twisting shadows, flares of fire and lightning, deflected spellglows flying up into the air to crash into walls and ceiling, carving out deep craters, debris spilling down toward the floor. She couldn't see anything.

So she crept to the left, squeezing between the pack of Aurors and Hit Wizards and the inside wall of the Atrium, behind the fountain. There was a small gap here, Hermione could push to the front without actually having to force her way through them. And she could see.

Not that she could make much out, as uncooperative as her eyesight was being at the moment. Voldemort of course — all in black, hairless skin deathly pale, eyes seeming to glow red. She caught flashes of his opponent — shorter than him, dark trousers, glittering green blouse under a black cloak with flashes of red, her hair a lighter red-orange, drawn into a long plait save for a few wisps around her temple, pale skin bronzed from the sun. And it was only flashes, it almost didn't matter that she could barely see straight, the woman (she was pretty sure) was too damn fast.

Now and again, she would pause for a couple seconds — curses lancing so quickly between the duelists the spellglows almost seemed a solid line of colour, broken here and there with shield charms or flashes of light as spells explosively died — before whirling into motion, quicker than a human should be able to move, enough she almost seemed to blur (and Hermione didn't think it was just the concussion messing with her), sliding along the ground, still sending the occasional spell off at Voldemort, his own spells missing her, sometimes lifting off the ground to whirl through the air before stopping again, trading more spells, the air burning with magical light or thickening with unnatural shadow (some kind of dark magic Voldemort kept using, she didn't know what that was) before she moved again — debris trailing after her, layered with charms until they glowed with it before raining down on Voldemort, caught with a smouldering black and red shield of some kind, or perhaps sparks of lightning would gather in her wake, exploding to life when she paused again, a dozen lightening bolts crawling across the floor and filling the air, Voldemort floating off the ground and conjuring metal to intercept them and casting more shields, before retaliating with arcs of black-purple flame, which the woman slipped between, dancing effortlessly through the air...

Hermione had never seen a magical duel like this. She'd hardly even heard of a duel like this, it was incredible...

While they traded another volley of spells, Voldemort's off hand was drawing some kind of pattern in the air, this odd, poisonous looking greenish goop accumulating around his hand, once the woman stopped moving for a second he brought his fingers up to his lips and blew over them, the goop bursting into hundreds of flying droplets — not aimed in their direction, thankfully — the woman whirled away in a blur again, when she reappeared whipping her cloak off of her. It had clearly been hit with a few of those droplets, now spreading, the cloth seeming to shrivel, while again flooding the room with lightning — with her free hand, somehow — she caught the cloak with a levitation charm, it twisted upon itself, spinning in the air, shredding into dozens of strips each touched with Voldemort's magic, a single flick of her wand remaking them all into long metallic needles, a couple charms set them to glowing, and the woman was moving again, twisting out of the way of a nauseating swirl of yellow-black magic, lifting into the air, hopping from one pillar to another as she ascended and arcing over Voldemort's head, where she slowed enough to be properly visible again, the cursed needles slicing down at the Dark Lord.

He dodged, moving nearly as quickly as she did, a black and white blur sliding across the ground, the spears tracking him as he moved but never quite keeping up. There was a blue-ish flash as each struck the floor, the material seeming to dissolve, stone turned into shifting sands faintly shimmering green, the craters growing and the sands spreading. The woman summoned a patronus with a swirl of her wand — a bird of some kind, Hermione couldn't be certain — sent it flying across the floor, flittering toward one of the spreading piles of cursed sand. The instant the patronus touched it there was a sudden explosion of silvery light, filling the room so thickly Hermione could barely see anything (though, like most light magic, it didn't hurt her eyes at all despite its brightness), everything was light and streaks of shifting shadow, pulsing again and again, presumably as the patronus touched more craters...

When the glare finally cleared — the sickly glimmer of dark magic in all the craters gone now, mundane crumbled stone — both duelists were standing stationary, still for longer than they'd been in the whole fight so far. They were facing each other at an angle from Hermione, the back of Voldemort's right shoulder to her, the unknown woman looking up at him with a slightly crooked smile. Voldemort was floating a couple feet off the ground, surrounded by a...glass, it looked like, he'd conjured a ball of glass around himself (or perhaps summoned debris from the shattered windows of the offices overhead and forged it together) — to defend himself from whatever all that silver light had been, presumably.

Hermione gaped, and she wasn't the only one — there was steam lifting off of Voldemort, a portion of his head and one bare foot gone an angry red, like a bad sunburn.

The woman had actually hit him with something.

She'd read about the last war, and because mages liked their dueling and all, people had tried to document all the significant exchanges throughout history as best as they could. So far as anyone knew, the incidents where Voldemort had ever been hit could be counted on the fingers of one hand. One, an incident in '75 involving Adjustment, against Professor Dumbledore; two, the Battle of Avebury in '77, against Auror Moody and Professor McGonagall; three, the Battle of Hogsmeade on Hallowe'en '79, against Beth's parents, Sirius, and Aberforth Dumbledore; four, a raid on the House of Bones two months later, against Beth's mum (one-on-one, amazingly); five, an attack on a muggleborn safehouse run by the Order early in '81, against Sirius and Neville's parents. That was it.

The only people who had ever injured Voldemort in a one-on-one fight were Albus Dumbledore, widely considered the most powerful mage in the country, and Lily Potter, who mostly held her own through prior planning and trickery (and, in true Gryffindor style, audacious dumb luck).

Now, this unknown woman was number three.

Voldemort asked the question everyone else was probably thinking (Hermione knew she was): "Who are you?"

The woman smiled. She seemed...faintly familiar. Now that Hermione could actually get a good look at her, that was the vague feeling she was getting, that she'd seen this woman before. She couldn't imagine where, though — it wasn't like Hermione really knew that many magical adults. Rather short and slender, like a lot of purebloods, the brilliant red hair, the long, pointy face, she could be related to a lot of mages she'd met, but. Instead of giving a name, she said, "I walk with the storm. If you don't know me for that, you won't understand."

That was gibberish to Hermione, but apparently not to Voldemort — or most of the rest of the mages in the room, judging by the hissing of gasps and whispers. The ball of glass vanished with the barest twitch of the Dark Lord's wand, for a short moment he just stared down at the woman. "If you are who you claim to be, you would wish to regain all that we have lost over these centuries as much as I. There is no reason for us to oppose each other."

"I weren't expecting you think so." One corner of her lips pulling up, she smirked, mocking, taunting. "About what was lost, you understand far less than you believe you do, Tommie dear." A shimmering blue curse lanced out, the woman jabbed it with her wand and it burst, falling to the ground in a shower of harmless white and yellow sparks. "Ooh, sensitive about our birth name, are we?"

Seething, his voice cold and venomous, Voldemort hissed, "I've distanced myself from mine no less than you have from yours. What shame is it you hide, I wonder?"

"I haen't hidden the name, boy, people simply forgotten it." That got another curse, a Torture Curse this time, the woman stepped just out of the way, smoothly and casually. "And this shame you speak on, being born of parents without the gift of magic? That be your shame, Tom, not mine."

This time, Voldemort didn't keep his retaliation to a single curse, a steady stream of spellglows again tying the two of them together — and the unknown woman laughed, bright and almost gleeful, facing the Dark Lord with a smirk, her eyes twinkling in the flashing light of their duel.

Her green eyes.

No...

But once Hermione saw it she couldn't un-see it, dazed enough by the thought that she teetered over, coming to lean against the wall, suddenly dizzy and breathless, but no, she wasn't just imagining it. The duel was somewhat slower this time, the two of them pausing now and again to toss taunts and insults back and forth, so the woman remained mostly visible, not zipping around with inhuman speed, and she—

She was the right height, but not nearly so distressingly scrawny — not like she never bloody ate enough (sometimes Hermione truly hated Beth's family), just really fit. A sprinter, or a football player, or a professional duelist, like. And her colouring was slightly off, her hair a couple shades too light and skin a couple too dark...but that could just be from sun exposure, her hair was lightest at the edges and it wasn't that much of a difference...

Her accent was wrong, sounding vaguely...Scottish...kind of? It wasn't quite right, but Hermione couldn't think what else to compare it to. Certainly not southern, not at all...

And she was older. Much older. It could be hard to tell with mages, they didn't really age much like normal people at all, but she looked to be, she didn't know, mid to late twenties? early thirties? By magical standards, that meant she could easily be as old as sixty.

Mages had done some work with time travel, but it was still a relatively new field of study. It was generally assumed only travel backward in time was possible. If one went back, the only way to return to one's own time was to live through every moment between. There was a sort of logical sense to that, when Hermione thought about it — after all, it was difficult to get to a place that didn't exist yet. At the very least, it was theorised that an attempt to travel forward through time was likely to end up crossing into alternate timelines as well...and then the traveller wouldn't be able to get back, because they'd be in the wrong universe (because parallel universes was something mages had experimentally confirmed to exist, these things were wild sometimes). Short-distance hops were relatively harmless, but it was believed travel to the distant past would always be a one-way trip.

Beth had tried to apparate away...while surrounded by an enormous accumulated volume of alchemised time.

What if the chain-reaction hadn't killed her so much as tossed her back? Not hours, not even years, but decades?

It sounded absolutely mad, Hermione knew that. Even in her own head. But that reckless, excited laughter, that crooked smirk, she knew that smirk. It was her.

And she'd come back for them. She'd been thrown through time, who knew how far, and she'd remembered, and she'd come back for them.

Because of course she did — Elizabeth Potter and her saving people thing, how could Hermione expect anything else?

Her throat clenched so tight it hurt, she felt her chest shivering, meaningless noises wrenched past her lips. She honestly couldn't tell if she were laughing or crying.

In a pause in the noise of the battle, Tom hissing in fury and the woman giggling — Beth never could resist taunting people she didn't like, even when she really, really shouldn't — came the roar of fire bursting into life, again, again, again and again and again. It took a moment for Hermione to place the sound, to follow the flashes of green light to the opposite side of the Atrium. The floo grates were spitting out people, dozens of people — more DLE officers, Order members, random Ministry officials.

Even with her eyesight still not quite cooperating, Hermione managed to pick out Dumbledore and the Minister near the front.

"Oh, good!" the woman — Beth, it had to be Beth — chirped, shooting the Minister a glance (Hermione couldn't see what kind at this angle). "I'm waiting on yous a come here. Gimme one second." She waved her wand at the pack of watching Death Eaters in a wide swish, turned to jab at Voldemort.

The air shimmered, a wide band rushing toward the Death Eaters, striking in a blink. Some had shields up, but it hardly seemed to matter — the spell slammed into the whole group like a massive anvil, tossing them back to crash against the wall, even the ones who had shields up plucked off the ground by the force. The magic was dispersed by the impact, but the energy released still swept across the room, a gust of wind tearing at everyone's clothes, even as far as Hermione, her hair dancing wildly around her head. The DLE officers in the room obviously recognised that for the opportunity it was, once the tempest died down a little leaping on the stunned Death Eaters from both sides, had them pinned.

Wind. It hadn't been a hex so much as, just, a concentrated front of air, bludgeoning the entire group of Death Eaters with blunt physical force. For the effect it had, she might as well have conjured a steel wall and banished it at them.

I walk with the storm, she'd said. Hermione had to see if she could find out what the hell she'd meant by that.

The jab she'd aimed at Voldemort was doing something to the stone of the floor, contorting, jabbing up into spears. But it wasn't just in one spot, whatever spell that was was spreading, racing across the Atrium toward the Dark Lord. He snarled, Hermione could hear it from here, casting at the floor, a crack of thunder split the air, his off hand raising, magic starting to gather around—

In a blink, a crackle of lightning, the woman appeared right behind Voldemort, turning on her heel, her wand sweeping down shoulder to hip, a line of red-yellow fire drawn in the air — not actual fire, she thought, just a curse that vaguely looked like fire. It struck him in the back before he could react, an undignified grunt ripped from his throat, the force of it knocking him forward just in time to run head-first into one of the spears of stone. Voldemort landed flat on his back, inches from the woman's feet.

He was still bringing his wand around when the green flash of a Killing Curse struck him right over the heart.

Hermione held her breath, the whole room seeming to go silent all at once. Even the fight with the other Death Eaters seemed to stop (though perhaps it was simply done already). They watched in disbelief, waiting, for what she didn't know.

Beth — it had to be Beth, decades older but still Beth — bent over, pulled Voldemort's wand out of his limp hand. She tapped the tip of her own wand against the wood, then tossed it into the air. It burst into voracious flame the second after leaving her hand, by the time it should have landed on the floor again there was nothing left, ash in the wind.

She gasped as Voldemort moved, she'd thought he was— No, he wasn't moving, something was lifting out of the Dark Lord's body, a tense smoke of dust and shadow, first a few wisps but quickly gathering into a menacing cloud of too-dense black, a few flickers of sickly green.

"Yeah, yeah." Beth turned to the too-solid-looking shadows, a swirl of her wand summoning her patronus again. (A raptor of some kind, Hermione was pretty sure, a falcon or buzzard.) "I'm knowing you're there. Go on, then, float off and lick your wounds elsewhere. I'll be finishing off the rest of you later."

There was a keening, sibilant screeching — high and piercing and loud, Hermione clapped her hands over her ears, gritting her teeth. The shadows (Voldemort? somehow?) reached for Beth, but then seemed to cringe away, the screeching only getting louder.

If the sound bothered Beth, she didn't show it. In fact, Hermione was pretty sure she rolled her eyes. "Patronus, you idiot."

The cloud hesitated a moment, churning and shivering, and then stretched out for the crowd of Ministry people, so fast, shields came up, shouts of surprise and terror—

A piercing beam of white-silver light lanced through the cloud, breaking it apart into separate wisps of scattered black and green, it took it a moment to reform itself. "Don't you even try any of that," Beth snarled. "Get you out of here — don't make me exorcise you. Go on. Go!"

With a last, echoing scream, the entire Atrium seeming to shake with anger and hatred, the air cooling several degrees in seconds, the cloud swirled around upon itself and, abruptly, vanished.

He was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Animam ex...] — _He doesn't have to get out the whole curse for you to know anything involving_ animam ex- _is probably not good. He's casting the killing curse, in fact. Obviously I changed the incantation, because "avada kedavra" is almost aggressively stupid. It's_ animam expedi _— the same length too, though probably slightly easier to say. And, bonus, it's not completely silly._


	2. 1996 — The North Wind

In the immediate aftermath of the battle at the Ministry, everyone with even minor injuries were sent off to Saint Mungo's. Hermione hardly had thirty seconds after that whatever the hell that was was gone — Voldemort somehow, obviously, but she hadn't realised it was possible to linger after death like that — she hadn't even yet gathered the strength into her shaking legs to try walking over to Beth (it _had_ to be Beth), when a couple Hit Wizards appeared, asking them if they were okay, packing them off to the hospital with hardly any discussion.

Hermione's actual treatment hadn't been too difficult — the longest part was probably the thorough examination for lingering curses she and apparently everyone who'd been in the battle would be getting, just in case. (Some curses had delayed or long-term effects that weren't immediately apparent, after all, it was a standard safety precaution.) She'd been given three potions and that was it, the lingering headache and dizziness immediately vanishing, the aches that would have developed into awful bruising without treatment.

She suspected one of those potions had been a calming potion of some kind, or at least something that had anxiolytic effects. Ever since she'd taken the potions, she'd been feeling weirdly...detached, and floaty, the world around her seeming just an extra step away, vaguely numb and tingly, light and untethered, like she might lift right off her bed and drift around the room. Her thoughts were slow, and clumsy, not in the same way as the confusion she'd gotten after hitting her head, but like all the pieces would fall apart if she didn't pay them enough attention, it took undue focus just to string her thoughts together.

She did _not_ like it.

The five of them had been given a room together, though only Hermione and Neville had needed much in the way of treatment — except Ginny, who'd apparently been hit with a sterility curse at some point, while the Healer worked on breaking it she'd rolled her (reddened) eyes and muttered something Hermione hadn't caught about predictable pureblood behaviour. (She was probably assuming some Death Eater had thrown that particular curse at her because they couldn't have blood-traitors _breeding_ , apparently that'd been really common in the first war.) Ron and Luna had been fine, were just given a couple potions for cuts and bruises — and probably the same calming potion Hermione had gotten, Luna seemed somehow even less present than usual — Neville's broken wrist had only taken a couple wand flicks and a tiny dose of Skele-Gro.

They were all treated, but they weren't allowed to leave — the DLE wanted to talk to them before they were sent back to Hogwarts. Hermione wasn't quite capable of feeling properly nervous, thanks to that damn potion, but even so she didn't think there was really anything to be worried about. Most likely, they just wanted statements from the five of them to piece together exactly what had happened down in Mysteries, she doubted they were going to be charged with anything.

While they waited, Hermione got in a confusing, frustrating argument with the other four. (Or, it would be frustrating if she could feel properly frustrated at the moment.) She hadn't been able to get closer — Beth had been mobbed by Ministry people once it was clear Voldemort wasn't getting up again, and Hermione had been too weak and injured to resist being dragged to the hospital — but she was _certain_ it was Beth. More certain than she honestly thought it was reasonable to be. The woman didn't act or talk like Beth, her appearance changed enough it was _difficult_ to recognise her, yes, and obviously she was much too old, but Hermione _knew_ , with absolute confidence. She couldn't explain it, really, she just...

Beth was her best friend — her _first_ friend, honestly, or the first one really worth mentioning. Hermione would always recognise her when she saw her.

She wasn't just deluding herself, seeing what she wanted to see. (Or, at least she didn't _think_ she was.) But it was very difficult convincing the others of that. Impossible, more like. They hadn't seen what she'd seen. Neville had argued, quite reasonably, that the noble families tended to only marry between each other, so after generations and generations they tended to look pretty alike — there were three broad phenotypical groupings, which the purebloods themselves tended to refer to by hair colour, but within those groups there wasn't really _that_ much variation. It wasn't at all impossible for Beth and this unnamed woman to look somewhat similar.

Except, that didn't _quite_ fit, because Beth had taken after her mother as much as her father, and her mother had been muggleborn. Sure, a lot of the purebloods looked sort of alike, but Beth _wasn't pureblood_. He'd then explained that Beth actually looked _a lot_ like the red-haired purebloods — Boneses, Prewetts, Weasleys (not _their_ Weasleys, who took too much after their Black grandmothers), and so forth — which was kind of a wild coincidence, because her father had been in the black-haired group. If this woman were a relative of the Boneses or the Smethwycks or the Bletchleys or something, that could explain the resemblance right there.

So, okay, they didn't look identical, sure, but that _was_ Beth, Hermione was sure of it. That smirk was _far_ too familiar, and the way she'd _taunted_ Voldemort, apparently taking delight in making him annoyed with her, that had Beth written all over it. She'd done the _same thing_ with Malfoy and Lestrange less than an hour before! It was _her_ , she was sure of it. She might have gotten tossed decades into the past, who knew what had happened to her since, but it was _still her_.

As confident as Hermione was, nobody else was convinced. None of them reacted particularly well to talking about it, either. It didn't take very long before Ron laid back on his bed, covering his face with his pillow — crying and trying to hide it, which was pointless, they _could_ still hear him. Ginny looked like she wanted to break something (or some _one_ ), and Neville just looked tired, drawn and pale. (He also kept wiping at his eyes when he thought nobody was looking.) The more she talked about it, the worse they seemed to be feeling, so eventually Hermione had just...stopped. She was still certain, but she was just making her friends miserable. They'd come around eventually.

Luna, as usual, was the strangest about it. One of the potions the healers had given her _obviously_ making her even more odd and confusing than usual, she'd said something about Elizabeth Potter being an idea, names were an idea, and a person was still a person even if their name didn't fit. Then something about no matter what people decided to call it the storm would still come all the same — Hermione had absolutely no idea what the hell she was trying to say, it _seemed_ completely random, but that was Luna Lovegood for you.

(Maybe people would have more confidence in Divination if Seers weren't so bloody cryptic and confusing all the time.)

Eventually, must have been a couple hours, a couple Aurors came by to interview them. Hermione didn't know either of them, but one of them was vaguely familiar, like she'd seen her in passing but never actually met. Like at Grimmauld Place, maybe — she suspected Vance was in the Order, but it didn't seem politic to just come out and ask.

The Aurors started with reassuring them that the five of them weren't the target of the inquiry, they were just gathering information on what exactly had happened down in the Department of Mysteries. The man set up a parchment and a quill enchanted to take dictation, and they were off.

The interview ended up being much longer and more complicated than the Aurors had probably been planning on. One of their first questions was why they were in the Ministry in the first place, obviously, so they'd had to start off with explaining the visions Beth got from Voldemort on occasion. They'd seemed skeptical, at first, but given it'd been happening for nearly two years now, since the Dark Lord had started regaining strength, and that Dumbledore himself had confirmed Beth had some kind of as-yet unexplained magical connection to him, they eventually accepted it. The most convincing point was the revelation about how exactly Mr Weasley had been found in time to get treatment — they'd clearly heard of that incident, even if they hadn't the others.

And then they had to explain that Sirius was innocent...except not really, because Vance didn't seem surprised at all, and Blishwick was much less dubious than Hermione would have expected. Vance made sense, if she really was in the Order, but once they'd explained the basics of the situation as they understood it — taking _another_ diversion from the topic they were supposed to be talking about, that was probably going to happen a lot — the Aurors informed them that an inquiry into the events in Edinburgh on 4th November 1981 was being opened even as they spoke. Apparently, Peter Pettigrew had been one of the Death Eaters captured at the Ministry, which obviously raised some very serious questions about the crimes Sirius had supposedly committed a decade and a half ago.

Despite the fact that that _was_ unambiguously good news, Hermione failed to hold a scoff — it was about damn time they looked into it, Sirius hadn't even gotten a hearing...

Blishwick shifting the roll of parchment up the table, giving the quill another foot of space, they got back to the subject at hand. Beth's vision of Sirius and Voldemort in the Ministry, with another quick backtrack to explain that Voldemort had been trying to get something in the Department of Mysteries all year (neither Auror appeared surprised), their failed attempts to contact the Order — they admitted the "proper authorities" were too bloody useless to rate even a moment's thought, to both the Aurors' amusement — they skipped their confrontation with Umbridge and the Inquisitorial Squad entirely, skipped to their thestral flight to London, slipping in through the visitor's entrance.

When Hermione pointed out there hadn't been any security when they'd arrived, Vance confirmed the Hit Wizards on security detail were missing, presumed dead — three posted in the Atrium and five in the lower levels, eight total. And that wasn't including the battle casualties, of course.

Hermione failed to hold in a guilty wince. When Beth set her mind on something there was no talking her out of it, there really wasn't anything Hermione could have done to prevent it, but...

Then they explained the fight in the Hall of Prophecy, which was apparently what it was called. She got the feeling through the whole discussion that the Aurors were impressed that they'd actually managed to slip away, and even do a bit of damage to the Death Eaters while they were at it. Hermione was probably more pleased than she should be that the men cursed by the Unspeakables' prophecy orbs, so were unlikely to ever recover even with thorough medical treatment they wouldn't be getting, included Lord Nott (among the worst people in the Wizengamot), one of the Lestrange brothers, and _Cyrus bloody Travers_ — in fact, Bones had given them all immunity against any prosecution for what had happened tonight, in no small part because they'd permanently debilitated Lestrange and _especially_ Travers.

While they all processed that, Hermione recalled Travers had tortured and murdered Director Bones's sister-in-law — there was no way being on the Director of the DLE's good side could possibly be a bad thing.

And then they came to the fight in the time room. Despite how relatively badly they'd done, even outnumbering the Death Eaters two-to-one, the Aurors listened to their scattered account with wide-eyed surprise, clearly impressed. Apparently, the Death Eaters in question had been Antonin Dolohov and Adrian Jugson — they were among the more infamous of Voldemort's followers, Dolohov in particular had killed several Aurors single-handedly — it was incredible that they'd done as well as they had.

The end of the fight was difficult to get through, Ron, Ginny, and Neville could hardly get any words out, so Hermione ended up taking over. The Aurors said the Unspeakables were just as baffled as everyone else by the chain reaction Beth's attempted apparation had caused, were still working out just what the hell happened, and would probably be at it for months to come. In the couple hours since, they had been able to identify the remains of both Death Eaters (though there hadn't been much left to go on), but there was no trace of Beth.

Which, as far as Hermione was concerned, was more evidence she was right, but she wasn't going to rub everyone's nose in it right now.

Hermione wasn't much help for the next bit, since she had been somewhat delirious at the time, but the others had recovered by this point, so they described huddling out of the way while the fight continued, then following them up to the Atrium. The Aurors were unphased by Luna predicting exactly when the Death Eaters would be running by the lifts — since Seers apparently were a real thing, presumably the DLE stumbled across them now and again — and took a moment to reassure them that they were not going to be charged for the deaths they'd caused. It was a complicated situation, and they really shouldn't have been there in the first place, but given the circumstances and just who the people they'd killed were, nobody much cared.

(Just baldly talking about the people she'd _killed_ , Hermione didn't like thinking about that, she'd rather not.)

(Hermione wasn't very good at _not thinking_ about things.)

"It was Beth, wasn't it."

They were just wrapping up, Blishwick already putting their special quill away. Vance glanced at Hermione, frowning a little. "I'm sorry?"

"The woman, who beat Voldemort." No flinches of fear this time, but then they _had_ all just seen the Dark Lord defeated. That had to be nearly as bad for his reputation as getting himself blown up trying to kill an infant. "It's Beth. Right?"

The Aurors glanced at each other, sharing a look Hermione couldn't read — not a favourable one, at least, probably wondering whether she were in denial or still addled from the hit to the head. And her friends didn't react much better either, Ginny scowling and Neville wincing and Ron covering his head with his pillow again. (Luna was just absently staring at the ceiling and humming to herself, because of course.) After a couple seconds of silence, Blishwick said, "The Ministry is all but positive she's the North Wind. She's calling herself Caphira at the moment."

"...The North Wind?"

"What do you know about immortal mages, Miss Granger?" Vance asked.

Okay, that was an ominous thing to say. "Not much, honestly, they don't come up very often. I understand most of them are metamorphs, who technically don't have a natural lifespan," no matter how completely wild of a thought that was, "but a number of them have preserved their lives artificially, through the use of a variety of magics. Why?"

"They tend not to hang onto their birth names for very long. Once upon a time, it was much safer to assume new identities now and again, and some have lived long enough their birth name would sound alien to modern ears. To keep track of them, people who study these sort of things give them epithets to be used no matter what name they're going by at the moment, just to keep them straight. The North Wind is one such epithet — she crops up now and again in Europe and the Americas, but she was originally Gaelic, we think."

"Or Danish." Neville tensed a little at the glances he got from Hermione and both Aurors, shrugging. "I read she was one of Hufflepuff's people."

Blishwick all but rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I've heard the same, but I'm not sure whether to credit that much. The Founders work their way into _everything_ from that era, you might have noticed."

"True, but my family's stories say—"

"Wait a second." A wave of unpleasant tingles rushing over her, Hermione could hardly get the words out, it took a couple tries for her voice to cooperate. "You're saying... If she came to Hogsmeade with Hufflepuff... That was _over a thousand_ years ago."

Nodding, a tinge of sympathy on her voice, Vance said, "Over eleven hundred, actually. And she would have been born _before_ then, of course. 'Caphira' could easily be twelve-hundred years old."

"That..." Hermione couldn't get out anything more than that — for one of the few occasions in her life, her words failed her entirely.

"I'm sorry, Miss Granger," Vance muttered. And she did actually sound it, to her credit, her voice low and cautious, eyes hesitant. "The phenomenon you described, the condition Dolohov and Jugson were in... The Ministry will be officially announcing Lady Potter's death this afternoon. It shouldn't have happened, we should have gotten down there sooner, but... Well, there's no excuse, is there. I am sorry."

The Aurors were sweeping out of the room not long after that, their trademark red cloaks, streaked here and there with char and spell damage, fluttering behind them. Left alone again, the other four returned to mourning in their own ways — Neville quiet and miserable, Ron loud and miserable, Ginny seething with impotent rage, Luna...well, being Luna — and Hermione just lay in her hospital bed, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. Not aching, really, but... The reality hanging over her was smothering, an unavoidable weight pressing down on her, turning her breaths short and shallow, not feeling sad or angry or anything of the like so much as just...empty, still.

She hardly even reacted when they were finally allowed guests — Mr and Mrs Weasley came barging into the room, near knocking the door off its hinges, swept their children up in tearful hugs, Lady Longbottom appearing not long after them, concerned but proud, almost smug, just behind her Mr Lovegood, as carefree and absent-looking as his daughter, drifting in to sit next to her without a word. (Hermione didn't think she would ever understand Lovegoods.) Even Sirius turned up, which _was_ a surprise. The DLE was looking into his case now, sure, but she had no idea how he'd gotten this far into the hospital without people loosing their minds over the evil mass-murderer waltzing around.

Maybe some kind of announcement had been made. Hermione wouldn't know, she'd been holed up in this room for hours now.

Sirius sat nearby, was talking to her — though whether he was seeking comfort or trying to offer it, she honestly couldn't tell, could go either way — but she wasn't really listening. She could barely think, everything else shoved aside, it was entirely impossible to consider anything but the crushing, horrible truth.

Hermione still thought she was right, about what had happened in the time room. That the space-warping effects of Beth's apparation in close proximity to so much alchemised time had triggered a peculiar chain reaction, tossing Beth into the past.

She'd just been sent much, _much_ further than Hermione had originally assumed.

She was the same person, Hermione was convinced — she _knew_ her, she knew that smirk, she didn't— It was Beth. It had to be.

But it also wasn't. Not really.

Twelve hundred years is a long, _long_ time. There was no telling how Beth had changed over the centuries. Or how much she'd _forgotten_. They'd known each other for nearly five whole years now and, while that was nearly a third of _Hermione_ 's life (more than a third of what she could _remember_ ), if her assumption of what had happened was correct... Five years out of twelve-hundred was, what...one half of one per cent? less?

It wasn't at all impossible that Beth might not remember Hermione at all. She might not remember any of...

Her friends and the Aurors hadn't convinced her that Beth was _dead_ , no — after all, there was no reason a time-displaced Beth couldn't be this North Wind person, that she was known to the Ministry didn't necessarily contradict Hermione's gut feeling of who she was. Or had been. Because, _twelve hundred years_ , if Beth had been away for so long...

She may yet live, but maybe Beth, everything that had made her who she was, was _still gone_.

Hermione had absolutely no idea when she'd started crying.

፠

Over the last days before the end of term, the mood at Hogwarts was very strange. Unsettled, she would say, waiting to see how the events in the Ministry would resolve.

The atmosphere of mourning that had already started settling over the school by the time they got back was completely unavoidable. While Beth never truly had had much in the way of friends, everyone at least knew _of_ her — and they had been hearing stories about her all their lives, those ridiculous myths springing up around the Girl Who Lived. (Hermione still hadn't heard an adequate explanation for where the hell those had come from.) The sense of loss permeating the entire school was almost tangible, thick on the air and on every word, eyes dulled with shock and reddened with tears.

The younger Gryffindors were taking it the worst. Beth had never gotten on with the upper years, or even much of their own year, but she'd always been strangely well-liked by the lower years, even in other houses. _Strangely_ , because Beth couldn't explain it any better than Hermione could. It wasn't like she'd been _trying_ to get them to like her — after five years at Hogwarts, Beth's social skills had been only slightly better than they'd been at the beginning (which is to say, _absolutely atrocious_ ). A bit of it was hero-worship by force of those stupid stories, she thought, to Beth's irritation, but it couldn't explain all of it. Perhaps it was her penchant for sticking her nose in whenever she saw bullying going on, or how she was always standing up to the more disliked professors. Also, sometimes, when people were practising their wandwork somewhere and Beth saw they weren't doing something quite right, she'd just walk up, show them how to do it proper, and then nonchalantly go right back to what she'd been doing, as though she'd done nothing of note at all — Hermione had laughed out loud when Beth had protested she couldn't teach their defence club, because _really_?

Maybe it was simply because Beth didn't treat them like a stuck-up bitch just because she was older than them, Hermione really couldn't say. Whatever it was, the younger students adored Beth, had since at least third year. In fact, Hermione had thought more than once that McGonagall should have picked Beth for prefect instead. Sure, Beth might not be much of a student, but she was far better at dealing with children — or people in general, but especially children — than Hermione was, and that was really what most of the job was.

Hermione couldn't count the times she'd stumbled across a kid in one of the lower years, first or second, hiding in a corner somewhere quietly crying. And it'd only been a couple days.

She never knew what the fuck she was supposed to do, whenever she found another one, _Beth_ would have known...

It didn't help that everyone was trying to be...considerate with her, she guessed was the word. She was expected to be hurt by Beth's death, more than most any of them, they expected her to be miserable, and...fragile. And she sort of was, she guessed — after all, it wasn't like Beth was coming _back_. But it made it bloody impossible for her to even attempt to (clumsily) comfort anyone, because they instantly turned it around on her, and then things got really weird and confusing, because she wasn't reacting how people expected her to.

With how the pitying looks had intensified over the last days, Hermione knew everyone was convinced that she was in denial. Which was irritating, but mostly harmless.

It did give her more than enough motivation to avoid people whenever possible, though.

But it was more than just Beth being dead — they now all had explicit confirmation that Beth had been right the whole time, that Voldemort had returned. _Nobody_ doubted it any longer. Under any circumstances, that would be a _horrifying_ realisation for anyone. (Well, _most_ anyone.) The last war had been devastating, especially among the segments of the magical British population who happened to attend Hogwarts. The scars left behind from that time were so deep that the entire student population (or at least those raised by mages), many of whom had been born after that Hallowe'en, had grown up being taught to fear Voldemort's name. Less like a man and more a monster from some old fae tale, like just speaking his name would make him stronger. The entire damn _country_ was superstitious about him.

Yet, Voldemort's second defeat had followed _immediately_ upon the revelation of his return, quickly enough most of the country learned about both events at the same time. He'd been defeated, immediately — no matter how temporary Hermione suspected that defeat was — by someone who had seemingly, just, appeared out of nowhere. _Nobody_ knew how to feel about that.

Some people had clearly had the same thought she had: all the books dealing with the more well-known long-lived mages had all been checked out, or else monopolised inside the library.

One of the very first things Hermione had done when they'd gotten back was write a letter to Beth ("Caphira"), saying... Well, she'd just asked if she was who Hermione thought she was. Or had been. That was all, she just—

She had absolutely no idea what she would _do_ with that information. Just, _this_ , suspecting it was Beth and not knowing for certain, she couldn't _stand_ it. She _hated_ this, she just wanted to _know_ , that was all.

Her breath had caught in her throat when the borrowed school owl had actually carried her letter away, disappearing into the sky to the south. The magics post owls used were fascinating — largely because nobody could quite explain _how_ they worked, presumably some kind of divination. (How else were they supposed to know where the recipient was?) The magic didn't track a _name_ , precisely, but instead used the sender's impression of the recipient as a focus. That meant it was possible to send post back and forth under an assumed name, or even to send things to someone whose name was entirely unknown.

Hermione had sent the letter off to Beth, and the owl had taken it.

(It was _her_. It had to be.)

All the books directly dealing with immortal mages might be unavailable, but after a bit of poking around in the catalogue Hermione had tracked down a book about the recognised grand sorcerers of the British Isles. A grand sorcerer wasn't necessarily immortal — the Headmaster himself was one such example — but any well-known British immortal was likely to be a grand sorcerer. The book was from the late 50s, slightly outdated, but it seemed like a good option.

And, fortunately, it was modern enough to have an index at the back. It only took a couple seconds for Hermione to find a listing for _North Wind, the_ — there were no pages, instead a note to _see: Eldingar-Andi_. _That_ entry actually pointed to a page in the book, or _multiple_ pages, but one of them was bolded and underlined, so.

That page turned out to be the beginning of a brief biography of this person, several pages long. (The book was pretty much made up of dozens of these profiles, apparently.) The profile was titled with _Eldingar-Andi_ , though one of the first things under that was a list of other names and epithets, where the title name was translated _lightning-breath_ — which was _weird_ , but people could sometimes get silly about these things. That did sound like Norse, they liked their figurative language. Some of the names were overdramatic, silly things like that, though some of them were perfectly ordin—

Hermione's breath caught in her throat.

_...Lizbet dí Scáthachluain (Hogsmeade), c. 880 - 1027..._

The witch who'd swept in out of nowhere and defeated Voldemort, who looked _so much_ like Beth, the immortal sorceress she was claiming to be had been at Hogwarts for the first century of its existence. And at the time, she'd been calling herself Lizbet.

 _Elizabeth_.

Her fingers shaking, tears stinging at her eyes, it took a moment for her to collect herself again. And she read.

The profile opened with a brief introduction. Apparently, there was some disagreement on when exactly "Eldingar-Andi" was born or where she was from — Britain had been a bit of a mess back then, and like many immortals she'd never deigned to be interviewed by any scholars of note. It was generally agreed by the people who studied these things that she'd been born at some point in the 9th Century, probably not before 850. Some claimed she'd originally been Gaelic (or perhaps Norse–Gaelic) — probably born in the northwest of Scotland, the Hebrides or Argyll, or perhaps Ross-shire or Inverness-shire — though others claimed she'd been Norse, born in one of the Viking exclaves in the Hebrides or perhaps back in Norway.

Because, of course, that she was from 20th Century England wouldn't ever have occurred to them.

Whichever it turned out to be, "Eldingar-Andi" had been recognised as a powerful storm-walker from a young age. Hermione had absolutely no clue what that term meant, so she flipped back to the index again, and was referred to a quick overview of certain old forms of witchcraft that had mostly faded out of use, but were relatively common among famous grand sorcerers of the past. Apparently, certain mages had an affinity for... Well, ancient people would have described it as an ability to commune with the spirits of the earth, the water, the air — it was a talent for a kind of nature magic, basically. Storm-walkers in particular were said to be able to divine events at a distance simply be feeling the wind, and could travel those distances _on_ the wind, flying over the earth at speeds much greater than had been available to mages before the development of apparation. They could conjure lightning with ease ordinary mages could not, and the most powerful, according to legend, could even call down storms, thrashing their enemies with wind and rain and hail.

That was just... Somehow, Hermione had had no idea this sort of talent existed. The _literally creating thunderstorms_ thing was a little much, but the rest of it seemed damn impressive just on its own.

Hermione remembered, the woman at the Ministry had cast incredible volumes of lightning from her bare hand, no wand necessary.

Anyway, back to the profile she'd been reading. "Eldingar-Andi" was mostly known as a battlemage — most times she popped up throughout history involved her participating in some conflict or another. She was also an enchantress, though not a particularly prolific one, and was known to have some knowledge in blood magic and curse-breaking.

She almost had to laugh at that — Beth wasn't even taking Runes...

The biography filling most of the rest of the profile was rather scant on detail, just a brief overview not really meant to be exhaustive. It was generally accepted that she'd been in what was now called Hogsmeade Valley (Scáthachluain in Gaelic) before the founding of Hogwarts, though nobody agreed how she got there. Some claimed she'd come with Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin, and others that she'd come with Hufflepuff — the first three Founders had already been working together for some time before Hufflepuff had shown up with her entire clan — or perhaps she'd simply already lived there before the famous quartet had come. However exactly she got there, _Lizbet dí Scáthachluain_ was known to have been among the Founders' early allies, one of their lieutenants during their war against Viking raiders in the area (and later various Nordic lords they'd offended by killing their sons) during the 9th Century.

Hermione realised, abruptly, that she'd probably read Lizbet's name before in passing, without knowing it was in any way significant. The Founding of Hogwarts was included in the History curriculum — she'd known about the war they'd led from the Valley before Hogwarts became a school, and obviously four people couldn't fight a war on their own, she'd read of their immediate subordinates before. Most of the books she'd read referred to them as their "knights", sworn personally to one of the four, but even on first glance that had struck her as anachronistic. Many of them had been lost to history, nothing of them known in the modern day but their names.

It was a bit absurd to think Beth might have _literally known the Founders_ , but...

Anyway, the profile continued, explaining that Lizbet had remained at Hogwarts after its conversion into a school of magic, though whether she'd done much teaching was uncertain. By that point, she was _definitely_ a member of Hufflepuff's household, though exactly what her position in it was was debated. At the time, the families of all four Founders (and other staff) lived with them at the castle, though Hufflepuff's was the largest. She'd left Sweden with her entire family, dozens and dozens of people all together — not all of them lived in the castle, but a number of them had, in what was now called Helga's Gallery on the ground floor and the Hufflepuff dorms underneath it. Among those who didn't believe she'd been one of Hufflepuff's people to begin with, most assumed she'd married into the clan, or was in some kind of extramarital intimate relationship with one of them (not unusual among the old Norse), a minority instead arguing that she'd simply been adopted by them over the course of the war (also not unusual). At least one old poetical work in Norse dating to the 13th Century depicted her as a favoured lover of Hufflepuff herself, but most scholars dismissed the claim out of a lack of any corroborating evidence — its characterisation of the Founder's personal life was... _divergent_ from most sources, to put it mildly, most believed it was fiction meant to scandalise and titillate.

It _was_ Scandinavian poetry, after all, written by mages of the northern isles. Old Norse literature could be quite... _colourful_. Downright pornographic, sometimes.

Not long after Hufflepuff's death in 1027, Lizbet left Hogwarts, though nobody knew where she went from there. Which wasn't unusual, it's hard to keep track of immortals sometimes, especially back before people kept very good records. There _were_ surviving accounts of a pagan storm-walker visiting a number of royal courts throughout Europe, some of whom might be her — it was generally assumed she'd spent a century or two wandering. Records from the Wizengamot confirmed _Lísbet Eldingándi_ had returned to Scotland by the beginning of the 14th Century, where she'd presumably been involved in the Wars of Scottish Independence, though what exactly her role had been had been forgotten in the intervening centuries. She settled on Stronsay in Orkney — which hadn't technically been part of Scotland yet, though the local mages acknowledged the Wizengamot — where she lived quietly for a couple centuries.

Or, _not_ so quietly? Around that time and continuing for another couple centuries, the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic State were plagued with pirates and raiders — one of the most dangerous of whom had been described as a pagan storm-walker, both of which had become quite unusual by then. Her identity had never been confirmed, but given that she matched "Eldingar-Andi"'s description and had clearly been unnaturally long-lived, that they were the same person was generally a good bet. The raids continued throughout the whole period, the by that point infamous storm-walker pirate fighting alongside the Danish and the Polish in wars against the League and the State respectively, until both collapsed in prominence during the 16th Century.

...Beth had been a _literal pirate_ for _centuries_? Jesus. Clearly she'd spent _far_ too much time hanging around Vikings a couple hundred years previously. That was...a bit mad, yes, but what she _really_ wanted to know was what the League had done to annoy her that badly. The Teutonic Order she understood — their State in the Baltic had been created _through a Crusade_ , they'd slaughtered countless native pagans in the process. Hermione could see Beth having...philosophical disagreements with them. The _League_ , though, they were just merchants...

Or, maybe it was _because_ they were merchants? Merchants would have all the stuff, of course — maybe Beth really _had_ spent too much time around Vikings.

"Eldingar-Andi" next popped up during the British civil wars of the 17th Century, though her involvement was relatively minor. She'd already learned the Wizengamot and a majority of British mages had sided...less _with_ the royalists and more _against_ the Parliamentarians and the New Model Army — most mages at the time (and still many to this day) had held to a syncretic belief system, an eclectic mix of Catholic Christianity and traditional Celtic paganism, which obviously the rabidly anti-Catholic, anti-pagan Parliamentarians hadn't approved of — though a minority of mages did side with the Parliamentarians, especially English mages with recent non-magical heritage. Including Frances Cromwell herself, who was called a Dark Lady these days despite the term not being quiet appropriate.

Though, Beth (it was still bloody weird to read this thinking it was Beth, but it _had_ to be...) hadn't been very involved — there were several accounts of her showing up to help mages either put up wards to keep the Parliamentarians out or flee ahead of their arrival. She'd fought Frances Cromwell and a couple of her lieutenants on one occasion, near Stirling, but only long enough for the local mages to escape before disappearing. The author claimed there was some debate over whether or not this was actually "Eldingar-Andi", since leaving an enemy alive behind her seemed rather out of character.

But, when Hermione thought about it, it made perfect sense — Beth wasn't a great student, but Hermione was certain she knew about the Cromwells and the Protectorate, they'd discussed the period before revising for History exams. Frances Cromwell had been killed by Nymphadora Black, some years after their encounter in Stirling. Beth couldn't change history.

Despite fighting against the Parliamentarians, when the newly-reformed Wizengamot was discussing the prospect of magical society entirely isolating themselves, _Lise of Stronsay_ had gone to Anglesey to give an address _opposing_ Secrecy. When delegates from various Western nations met in Bern to write a treaty that would become the Statute of Secrecy, _Lise_ appeared again, actually interrupting the meeting to speak against the proposition. Attendees reported that her speech had devolved into a long, angry tirade, probably full of curses and insults — she'd slipped into Norn, though, few others in the room had understood much of it.

It hadn't done any good, of course, Beth must have expected that — she obviously would have known how it would end. "Eldingar-Andi" had been seen several times over the next years, mostly associated with anti-Statutarians, first in Scotland, then Greece, Armenia, Persia, Ethiopia. Eventually, she ended up in the Americas, where she fought against European and Asian forces attempting to force the Native mages into compliance with the Statute. She was far from the only Westerner to defect to the Americans — even ignoring how controversial Secrecy had been at the time, Old World magic had been almost entirely alien to the Americans, they'd been more than happy to accept the help. Exactly how much she contributed to the (extremely bloody) conflict in the Americas is unknown, the period was a complete mess and records can get spotty, but by the end she'd been practically adopted by the Americans, so Western scholars just assumed she'd done _something_ to earn it.

"Eldingar-Andi" ended up settling somewhere along the Mosquito Coast — Hermione was pretty sure that was the eastern shore of Nicaragua and Honduras — retained as an advisor on European cultures and magics for a variety of American magical states. _Lisa_ , as she was going by now, participated in and perhaps even organised a program of identifying and removing mages born to muggle slaves across the Americas, dozens of institutions set up throughout the hemisphere to house and educate them. Because of the Statute of Secrecy, they had to leave their non-magical relatives in captivity...

...although, a _suspicious_ number of slave ships ended up being blown off-course in storms, all running aground in an improbably small span of coastline. The Americans insisted, of _course_ it's a coincidence, and who is this _Lise of Stronsay_ person they're talking about, anyway? No, nobody by that name here, the ICW was just making things up now.

Hermione had to stop reading for a moment, trying to choke down laughter — it didn't matter that exams were already over, Madam Pince would kick her out if she was too loud anyway. It's just, that was just— It was such a _Beth_ thing to do, that was all.

At some point in this period _Lisa_ took a muggleborn apprentice — a former slave, but not one Beth had had a hand in rescuing, she'd escaped on her own as a child via accidental magic. When the apprenticeship was over, the woman (who went irritatingly unnamed) stayed with _Lisa_ , assisting with the rescue of muggleborns, and they eventually...

For a couple seconds, Hermione could only stare at the page, dumbfounded.

...started a family? _Lisa_ and her former apprentice (who was _still_ unnamed) didn't _marry_ , presumably because it hadn't been legal where and when they'd lived — it was in many magical nations, and had been for a long time — but they _did_ have children. Through the use of blood magic, most likely.

It took what was probably an unreasonably long time for Hermione to process the idea. Not that Beth had had children at all — if she'd been around for _nearly twelve-hundred years_ , well, that she might have had kids at some point wasn't a weird idea at all.

She'd had absolutely no idea Beth liked girls. In fact, Hermione had thought she'd had a crush on Michael Corner. Which Hermione had thought was kind of weird at the time, they didn't really have much in common, or really even talk all that much, but...

She didn't know why this bit of information was sticking out to Hermione as _especially_ weird, given Beth had apparently _gone back in time and was now over a millennium old_. It just did.

Not that she _cared_ , really, Beth's sexuality was none of her business, it was just weird.

But anyway, "Eldingar-Andi" had a sizable number of descendants in the Americas now — _Lisa_ and her (still unnamed!) partner had had five or six children, most of whom had gone on to have children, and then most of _them_...and that had been over two hundred years ago now, so, lots of people by this point. As in, literally hundreds. The clan was named after _Lisa_ , taken from her most common epithet and translated into a local language — though, yet again, the author didn't say what they were actually called — mostly living along the Mosquito Coast and in a couple of the eastern Mayan states.

The author then skipped over about a century and a half. "Eldingar-Andi" returned to Europe for the first time since the Statute of Secrecy early in the 20th Century — she was first spotted in Syracuse in 1921, then Venice, before settling in Linz in 1924. Now using the name _Liliána Hajós_ , it didn't take long for her to get involved in...

...the _Gemeenschoppist_ movement. The same political movement originally inspired by Grindelwald. In fact, she was considered a major figure in revolutionary Austria. The same short-lived magical government that was one of Grindelwald's major allies.

...Shite.

Biting her lip, her finger playing with the edge of the page, Hermione gazed sightlessly at the offending paragraph, turning the revelation over in her head. It wasn't as bad as that might sound...she was _pretty_ sure. She'd learned by now that her initial impression of Grindelwald had been wildly inaccurate — though it'd taken extracurricular reading she'd done in her free time in fourth year to finally figure that out. She'd heard Voldemort described as a Dark Lord, and then she'd heard Grindelwald described as a Dark Lord, and she had, somewhat childishly, assumed that meant they'd been similar. Turned out, it was much more complicated than that.

For one thing, Grindelwald didn't _invade_ other European countries so much as support similar revolutions within their borders. So, yes, he _was_ providing material and training to people attempting to overthrow various magical governments, but revolutionary Saxony under Grindelwald didn't actually attack anyone. While some governments _really_ did not like him, and considered his support of subversive groups within their borders tantamount to an act of war, fighting _between_ countries didn't break out until Muscovy (western Russia) declared war on revolutionary Lithuania. The Lithuanians _asked for help_ , so a number of Grindelwald-allied countries — his own Saxony, Bohemia (the Czech Republic), Austria, and Moravia (Slovakia), all led by revolutionary governments — declared war on Muscovy in retaliation. So then Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria joined the war on Muscovy's side, Germany (the southern half) declared war on Hungary and Poland to support Austria, and Livonia (Estonia) and the Finns ended up getting dragged into it to support the Lithuanians, and then Poland declared war on the Scandinavians (for _some_ inexplicable reason), and Sicily (the island plus the southern third of mainland Italy, pro-Grindelwald) declared war on Tuscany (the middle third, anti-Grindelwald), so Genoa and Venice declared war against Sicily, so Greece and Albania declared war against Tuscany and Illyria (roughly Yugoslavia) declared war against Venice, so Macedonia and Bulgaria and Romania declared war against Albania, Greece, and Sicily, so Helvetica (Switzerland) joined in alliance with Genoa and Venice, all three of which were caught committing atrocities against their own people (revolutionaries and their allies and families, and sometimes just muggleborns in general), so then _all_ the revolutionary governments declared war against them, including the newly-created provisional government in France and allied Aquitania (southern France and eastern Spain)...

The whole thing had been a messy bloody nightmare, was what she was saying.

And, right there, that Grindelwald and his allies declared war against Helvetica, Genoa, and Venice for their treatment of muggleborns, that was an important detail — muggleborns and non-human magical beings had mostly been allied with the revolutionaries. Humanocentric and pureblood supremacist policies were actually among the things Grindelwald had been trying to do away with. In a sense, Voldemort wasn't _continuing_ Grindelwald's mission so much as _refuting_ it — the Death Eaters could be seen as a counter-revolutionary response to the Gemeenschoppists a few decades before. Really, Grindelwald and Voldemort were closer to opposites, ideologically speaking.

So, less wizard Hitler, and more wizard Lenin, or someone like that. Hermione thought that comparison was... _closer_ to accurate. Still not great, but better.

The point was, the idea of Beth being involved in the Austrian Revolution was perhaps not as bad as Hermione might have assumed a couple years ago...but it still wasn't _great_. Especially since the revolution in Austria had been particularly bloody — not as bad as France or Poland, true, but still.

But anyway, according to this book, _Liliána Hajós_ had been a sort of chief of security for the Austrian Gemeenschoppists — early in the revolution, warding their meeting places and providing enchantments to detect deception or concealment, and eventually managing domestic security for all of magical Austria. The expected revolutionary tribunals did proceed apace, but the book acknowledged that Beth, affectionately referred to by Gemeenschoppists as Colonel Lili, did keep the prosecutions relatively well-aimed at the people actually guilty of wrong-doing. (By the Gemeenschoppists' definition of wrong-doing, which the author obviously had issues with, but that was beside the point.) But, while the revolutionary government didn't indiscriminately slaughter the families and associates of former public figures, they did have a habit of turning up dead, mostly at the hands of random pro-revolutionary citizens — conservative commentators accused _Liliána_ of not doing nearly enough to prevent these atrocities...

...which Hermione didn't think was _quite_ fair. Revolutions were a messy business, after all, she didn't think the Gemeenschoppists could _necessarily_ be blamed for what random people did — it wasn't like the citizenry would have informed the new government beforehand that they planned to lynch a wealthy family and loot their home. Especially given magical means, yeah, she wasn't surprised things had gotten out of hand in multiple countries.

In any case, conservative forces led by the ICW _eventually_ managed to force France, Germany, Sicily, and Saxony into surrender — the fall of Saxony and the capture of Grindelwald saw many revolutionary governments call for a cease-fire, and the war was effectively over. Apparently, _Liliána_ had argued against surrender — the war was actually going rather well for the Gemeenschoppists in the east, she was convinced they could still turn it around — but Austria acceeded to the ICW's terms. Terms which had included the dismantling of the revolutionary government and the surrender of certain figures to the ICW for prosecution — _Liliána_ had been one of those prominent Gemeenschoppists to be tried in international court.

It was at her trial that her identity had been revealed — she hadn't exactly gone around telling people she was a famous immortal sorceress, after all. While that had made some people even _more_ eager to convict her (she had been a _literal pirate_ for _centuries_ ), the international court couldn't prove that she'd ever committed any serious crimes during the Austrian Revolution, nor ordered others to do so. In the end, she was cleared of all charges — though she was blacklisted from ever holding any office with the ICW, as well as in a number of ICW nations that adopted the resolution — and was deported back to her descendants in the Americas.

She hadn't stayed there for long, though. Just a couple years before this book was printed in '56, she'd returned to her old home in Stronsay, showing every indication she planned to stay there for the foreseeable future. And that was about it, her whole profile.

Skipping over some extremely judgemental claims about her personality and morality, of course — it was _quite_ clear that the author very much disapproved of her. Hermione had mostly been ignoring those parts.

Sitting back in her chair, Hermione folded the book closed. And she stared at the cover, blankly, too many thoughts whirling in her head all at once to pick out anything coherent.

She noticed her eyes were watering a bit, she wiped them away, cursing to herself. Hardly noticed. She didn't know _why_ she was crying, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Beth was _okay_. (Assuming this was Beth, of course, she still felt unreasonably confident of that.) At the very least, she was alive, she hadn't died down in the Ministry, she was _alive_.

 _Twelve hundred years_.

She was _Lilly of Stronsay_ now. How much of Beth was even left?

How had Luna put it? That a name was just an idea, that a person was who they were no matter what they were called. Which almost sounded reassuring — like Beth was still _Beth_ , no matter that she wasn't called that anymore — but it could be thought of the other way around too. If she'd left her name behind, what else might be gone?

Did Beth even _remember_ Hermione? It'd been so very long, for her...

Was it worth it to try to contact her at all? Beth was literally ancient, and she'd done _so much_ , and Hermione was just...well, _Hermione_ , some random teenage schoolgirl — one who had a connection to Beth, but who knew how much _Lilly_ (or Caphira, whatever) would care about that? People grew apart after only a few years, but _over eleven hundred_...

Hermione couldn't help the thought that they'd have absolutely nothing in common anymore, that Beth would have little reason to want to talk to her. That, if Hermione kept trying to contact her, she'd only find it annoying.

But...

She _couldn't_. She couldn't just leave it. Even if nothing ended up coming of it, she had to... She _needed_ to know, at least, that it was Beth, or _had been_ Beth — that, whoever she was now, that she was okay. Even if she never spoke to Hermione again... Well, obviously Hermione wouldn't be _happy_ with that, but it was _something_ at least. She couldn't leave this be without that much.

Doing her best to choke down sobs attempting to crawl up her throat, Hermione shoved the upsetting book aside, and started back for Gryffindor. She had another letter to write.

Oh! She should give it to Hedwig! If nothing else, Hedwig would probably recognise Beth, would be more persistent about getting a response — or at least just hanging around being a big feathery irritant. That was an _excellent_ idea, yes. Now she just had to figure out what the hell she was going to _say_...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Eldingar-Andi_ — _I'm not very confident this is correct. Particularly, I'm uncertain whether this should be definite or indefinite, and whether the base word in a kenning should be in the genitive when used as an epithet. I'd probably want to reduce it to a compound word if I'm putting_ andi _in the definite genitive..._
> 
> _See this is what happens when I play with languages I don't speak at all. Lol_
> 
> * * *
> 
> _So, right, this is a thing. I was reading Of a Linear Circle by flamethrower when this just appeared in my head...because that's a thing that happens, seriously can't help it. Hate my brain sometimes. The inspiration is sort of a combination of that and A Long Journey Home by Rakeesh (which hasn't been updated in three years and I am very sad). The plan is to bounce back and forth between flashbacks and what's going on in the modern day, blah blah, you can probably imagine the general idea of where this is going just from what's here so far._
> 
> _This is something I was randomly working on for a while, though with my awful difficulty writing lately I haven't touched it in a little bit. The third chapter is mostly finished, but I have no idea when I'll get to wrapping it up. I'm going to try to focus on the Plan. My other stories are unlikely to get any updates until I've made some progress with that, we'll see._
> 
> _Writing has been fucking impossible for a couple weeks now, for some reason, no idea. Sleep is hard? Eh. But since I haven't gotten anything out in a while, I thought I'd throw something at my poor, neglected readers. Merry Christmas?_
> 
> _—Lysandra_


	3. 1996 — An Unexpected Guest

Returning to ordinary, mundane Oxford after months at Hogwarts always felt rather jarring.

It hadn't taken Hermione very long to become accustomed to magic, despite how alternately amazing and absurd it could be, and returning to going without it always required an adjustment. The first days back, she would reach instinctively for her wand over minor things — finding a book, dealing with her damn frustrating hair, cleaning a spill — before remembering at the last moment she really shouldn't. She _had_ slipped before, casting minor spells without thinking, but she tried to force herself out of the habit as quickly as possible.

It'd occurred to her, _she_ had never gotten a notice from the Ministry informing her she'd broken certain laws surrounding the use of magic in the muggle world — which was ridiculous, given that Beth had and _she_ hadn't even cast the spell in question. Of course, that incident, there had been muggles who weren't Beth's relatives present, while Hermione's slips were only ever in front of her parents, who were exceptions under the Statute...and maybe however they were detecting these things couldn't tell who did the magic, just that magic was done. She didn't know, but that was the only thing that made sense.

Hermione couldn't put words to what it was exactly, but home also just _felt_ different. The air was...thinner, stale. Hogwarts was, she knew, one of the most intensely magical places in the country, the wards focusing the magic of the environment like a lens, until she could almost _taste_ it around her, sweet and tingly, warm and electric. By comparison, her home in Oxford was just...less. Cold and bland.

The feeling wore off after a few days, but it always left Hermione feeling strained and slow upon her return home, more easily exhausted or frustrated. It didn't help that her parents insisted on forcing their company on her. She loved her parents, of course, she wasn't saying she didn't want to spend time with them — especially since she didn't see them much at all these days, really. Just, while Hermione was reeling from the sudden dearth of magic in the environment, on a level she still wasn't entirely aware of, was the _worst_ time for them to do things together, or really talk all that much.

Her welcome home had only been _more_ awkward this time. Her parents got the _Prophet_ — they'd seen the announcement of Beth's death like everyone else, and like everyone else had swiftly come to the conclusion that she was in denial or something. They were quite worried, enough she'd overheard them one morning discussing whether they could find a professional for her to talk to. Hermione had turned right around and gone back up to her room, had delayed breakfast that morning until after they'd left for the day.

If it were up to Hermione, she would spend the first few days alone in her room, unpacking and poking at some of her summer homework, and just unwinding. Once she was recovered, only a few days, _then_ they could do the usual _welcome home_ , hanging out and catching up and everything. That would really be better for all of them, she thought, Hermione less irritable and her parents less frustrated with her irritability, the awkwardness of those first days not lingering over the rest of the summer.

But, in order to do that she'd have to explain that she was magically suffocating, or something, and simply didn't have the patience to deal with them right now. She could never work up the nerve to actually say that, so.

And after those first few days, it was always...quiet. Uncomfortably quiet. Her parents both worked, of course, and had for longer than she could recall. She vaguely remembered she'd gone to daycare before she was old enough to go to school, and her primary school — and toward the end secondary school, she'd skipped a couple years — had after-school programmes she could linger at until one of her parents could drop by to pick her up. When school wasn't in session, Hermione had stayed at home on her own since she'd been...seven? Maybe eight, she couldn't remember for certain. Sometimes, one or both of her parents would come home on their lunch break, but it wasn't unusual for her to be alone in the house for hours and hours every day.

And it was quiet, in a way Hogwarts never really was. In some of the out-of-the-way sections of the castle, or out on the grounds, sure, but the places that were actually _used_ — the Great Hall, the library, the entirety of Gryffindor Tower? There were always people about, there was always something happening, some kind of activity always going on around her at all times.

Not that Hermione really thought that was a good thing. It could be bloody impossible to get any reading done at Hogwarts sometimes. The library always had too many people in it, ultimately producing one distraction or another. (Not to mention, people taking the opportunity of her revising on her own to hiss insults or fling jinxes at her, she was more exposed in the library than she liked.) Gryffindor Tower was, of course, _full of Gryffindors_. The common room, forget it, there were always people about chattering, laughing and yelling, practising spellwork or getting into shouting matches, playing noisy and distracting magical games, it was impossible.

Her dorm room wasn't much better — with the exception of Beth, she did _not_ get along with any of the girls in her year. Fay was just a sport nut, but Lavender and Parvati were _mean_. More Lavender than Parvati, admittedly, but they both reminded Hermione of some of the _awful_ girls she'd been forced to deal with in primary and secondary ( _especially_ secondary), at their worst only a _little_ less awful than Malfoy and his goons. They probably weren't as bad as they might have been if she weren't friends with Beth — one incident in second year had ended with Beth hexing Lavender, and bluntly refusing to apologise when the girls had gone to McGonagall, she assumed they thought Beth would retaliate if they crossed into outright bullying — but that still didn't mean they weren't unpleasant to be around. And also noisy, they gossipped _all the time_ , about the stupidest things...

As annoying as it'd been at first, at some point she'd gotten used to things going on around her all the time. Coming back to the quiet of her home was always...vaguely disconcerting. On previous summers, she'd even developed the habit of taking a bus into town, going out for lunch or to a library or a bookstore or just hanging around somewhere on campus, just to be somewhere that was less _quiet_.

So, when the doorbell went off, disturbing that overwhelming quiet, Hermione was rather more surprised than it called for. Once her heart had stopped thundering in her chest, she started for the door, pondering on the way who that was likely to be. The neighbourhood they lived in didn't welcome solicitors, and it was too early for it to be someone canvassing for the next general election. Unless someone was gathering signatures for some petition or other, that happened sometimes. Though, usually they were intelligent enough not to do it when most people were going to be at work...

Hermione tipped up on her toes, peering through the pane of glass set into the door at the person waiting outside — and she froze. Long hair a vibrant orange-ish red, almost seeming to burn in the sunlight, balanced on one shoulder a huge owl, almost comically large compared to the short, a short, slender woman. She didn't look quite the same, too old and her skin darkened from the sun, but Hermione knew her at a glance anyway.

 _Beth_.

Her fingers shaking badly enough it took multiple tries to turn the lock, Hermione yanked the door open, barely caught it before it slammed into the wall. And she stood on the threshold, blankly staring at the woman on her doorstep, her breath caught in her throat. She had no idea what to say, but she doubted she'd manage to speak a word even if she did.

One of Beth's eyebrows twitched, her lips curving in a faint smile. "You are very persistent, Miss Granger."

Hermione didn't know which part of that short statement was most unsettling — her best friend speaking in a _completely wrong_ accent, or her best friend calling her _Miss Granger_. "I'm– I... I don't mean to– to— I just..."

"I know. I did read the letters." And that was it, Beth didn't actually answer any of the questions that had been in those letters — though Hermione was confident enough at this point that she didn't really need her to — or say, well, Hermione wasn't sure what should be said in this moment, but _something_ , certainly. Instead Beth just stared at her, still and watchful.

She swallowed down her nervousness as best she could, took a step back from the door. "Er, come in, please." Oh, shite, she should get some tea going, she thought they still had some biscuits — though, last she'd checked Beth didn't really like lemon...

It wasn't until she was stepping through the door that Hermione realised Beth was wearing a dress — that was just _weird_ , Beth only ever wore a skirt if she couldn't get away with trousers. (At the time, Hermione had thought Beth was almost more annoyed about needing to find a dress for the Yule Ball than she was about finding a date.) It was a deep blue — complicated designs stitched in yellow along the hem, the neck, seemingly at random here and there — loosely-draped and cinched at the waist with what looked like a scarf, showing her clavicles, her arms from fingers to shoulder, her legs below her knees, hardly scandalous but still more skin than Beth was comfortable showing in public. She didn't know, it was just...

Even weirder, Beth was _wearing jewellery_. The first she noticed was the largest, near the scarf around her waist — black, stitched with twisting lines of yellow and white and a pale greenish-blue — which wasn't _tied_ over her left hip, both ends instead run through a ring (bronze or copper?), a couple pins holding it in place, hung from the ring a couple strings of glass beads, blue and green and red, trailing down with both ends of the scarf nearly to her knee. When Hermione glanced down, she noticed she was wearing anklets, a few thin wires twined together, more beads hanging from them here and there. Her ears were even pierced, though not with anything particularly flashy, just a plain pale ring (silver, maybe) in each lobe, then on the left up the edge of her ear one, two, three, four more. Hermione was faintly taken aback, couldn't help staring for a second — she'd literally _never_ seen Beth wear any kind of jewellery at all. It was just...

Her appearance was just...subtly _wrong_ , more details making her seem less familiar than she should, unsettling.

Hermione also noticed she was barefoot but couldn't say she was surprised about that one — she'd probably apparated straight here from wherever she was staying, and Beth had never liked shoes much anyway.

Trying to shake off her nervousness, and completely failing, Hermione led her unexpected (and annoyingly unnerving) guest through to the kitchen, immediately set about making tea. She heard a faint laugh, glanced over to see Beth slowly shaking her head, smirking with amusement. Well, what else was she supposed to do, she'd thought offering tea was just the polite thing to do, no reason to go _smirking_ at her, Beth...

Neither of them spoke for long moments. Hermione twitched when Beth finally did, water running over the outside of the tea kettle. "Have I been here before?"

"Oh, um, no, you haven't." Hermione had invited her over a couple times, but the logistics were sort of complicated, it never ended up happening.

"I thought not, but I wasn't sure."

Implying that she _had_ forgotten, at least a little bit. Her breath hot and tight in her throat, Hermione ignored the implications of that simple statement as well as she could.

Eventually, she ran out of things to distract herself with — tea poured and biscuits set out on the table, the both of them seated, looking across the tiny kitchen table at each other. She'd sort of hoped that giving herself a moment to calm down from the shock of finding Beth on her doorstep would... Well, that she'd know what to say, at least have _something_ to say. Instead, she just...stared.

Beth didn't look _nearly_ as uncomfortable as Hermione, reclined casually in her chair, taking a first sip of her tea. (She hadn't even put sugar in it.) "You have questions, Miss Granger."

"Hermione."

Her lips twitched a little, probably at how forcefully Hermione had blurted that out. Beth hesitated, just for a second, then nodded. "Hermione, then. You may ask. I have the feeling this beautiful girl here," she said, reaching up to scratch at the feathers of Hedwig's chest, "won't leave it be until you do. By-the-by, what's her name?"

"You...don't remember her name?" That was just...sad. More than Hermione thought was quite reasonable, enough she was almost worried there might be tears in her eyes.

"No," Beth muttered, her voice a little absent, glancing at Hedwig over her shoulder. "I know she's mine, but, I don't remember." Hedwig made a little birdy huff, started fussing over Beth's hair, as though trying to pick out tangles; Beth smiled, a little, faint and shaky.

Okay, yep, definitely threatening to cry now. Hermione took a couple slow, careful breaths, forcing down the entirely unwelcome tension in her throat — a gulp of tea helped a little. "Hedwig. You called her Hedwig."

Beth snorted. "Really."

"Yes...?"

"Oh, I don't mind the name," Beth said, lifting her owl-free shoulder in a lazy shrug. "I think I just figured out why I liked Hadwiǵ so much. I knew there was a reason she stuck in my head the first time we met, but I forgot why."

Hermione took a slow breath, trying to gather her thoughts, spinning away on several different tangents that were _really_ not that important. "She was a birthday gift. Hagrid got her for you when he took you shopping for school supplies at Diagon Alley the first time, when you were eleven."

Frowning a little, Beth slowly nodded — she clearly didn't remember any of this. "Rubeus Hagrid? the gamekeeper?" A smirk twitched at her lips. "You know, I always thought I remembered my rescuer being so bloody large because I was a child at the time. I hadn't thought he was _really_ just that big."

Or maybe she _did_ remember a little. Back in third year, Beth had finally told Hermione what had happened that summer, her awful relatives fleeing the letters until Hagrid finally caught up with them, pulling Beth out of some miserable, sodden cottage somewhere on the coast. Beth hadn't called it a 'rescue' at the time, but Hermione had certainly thought the word applied.

Hagrid had been completely _devastated_ by Beth's "death", he looked miserable all the time, and Hermione nearly said something about that, but... She didn't know, it just didn't seem quite...polite? That wasn't it...

Besides, what was Beth supposed to do about that? Somehow, Hermione doubted she planned to return to Hogwarts and everything...

She should, just, talk about something else, before she blurted out something on what Beth should do about all the people mourning her. (She probably should do _something_ , but Hermione doubted she'd react to the suggestion very well — Beth never had liked being told what to do.) "So, what's going on now?"

Beth blinked. "Going on?"

"These last couple days, you know. I assume Voldemort isn't really dead." This was, in fact, _not_ what she really needed to talk to Beth about, but it was a safer topic, so.

"Oh, good, you say the name," she chirped, smiling. "It's a very silly name, I can't figure why Britons are so frightened of it. And I _did_ kill him, but he will come back — with Bellatrix Lestrange and Augustus Rookwood still on the loose, I don't imagine it'll be very long. Of course, when he does I'll just kill him again, until we can rid ourselves of him more permanently. Do you know what a horcrux is?"

It took Hermione a second, a little dumbfounded by Beth talking so casually about _killing Voldemort_ (as though it was _easy_ and of little consequence), to find her voice. "Er. No."

Beth nodded, humming to herself. Plucking one of the biscuits up off the plate, "It's an old form of soul magic — Egyptian, I think. The user creates a vessel that, so long as it remains, will anchor their essence to the land of the living. It's the best fit for what Voldemort's deathlessness looks like." Beth took a bite of the biscuit, her face immediately twitching with a frown.

"So, as long as you don't find these horcruxes...horcruces?...then he'll just keep coming back?" That was an...unpleasant thought. Beth didn't answer immediately, gingerly chewing, washing down her bite of biscuit with a couple sips of tea. "I'm sorry, I wasn't certain you liked lemon, but it's all we have at the moment."

"It's not the lemon," Beth said, nose pinching a little. "People put too much bloody sugar in everything. No wonder your teeth are all rotting out of your skulls..." Hermione bit her lip to keep herself from laughing — that sounded _very much_ like something her mother would say, it was absurd. "Anyway, yes, we have to find all of his anchors before he'll die for good. I went into the Ministry yesterday to meet with Amelia Bones, and we're making plans to track them down. In the meantime, I'll keep squishing him whenever he's stupid enough to show his face. Like a particularly ugly bug."

Hermione let out a harsh snort, nearly spilling her tea.

Her lips pulling into a smirk, Beth lifted one shoulder in a lazy shrug — _clearly_ amused with herself. (She might be older and dressed strangely, but Hermione still knew what a smug Beth looked like.) "Of course, I was _supposed_ to be in the Ministry meeting with Fudge, but I went and forgot to go up to his office. Silly me, getting absent-minded in my old age."

 _Old age_ , right... "Uh-huh. I'm sure Fudge being a completely useless excuse for a Minister has nothing to do with that."

Scowling a little, Beth said, "Honestly, it's just that he's awful annoying. It doesn't help that I think he's trying to attach himself to me to save his political career — the snivelling _níðingur_ got caught with his prick in his hand over this whole thing, scrambling to cover his pampered arse."

Fighting to keep a smile off her face, Hermione forced out a disapproving sigh. " _Must_ you be crude, Beth?"

An odd look crossed Beth's face — confused, maybe? Whatever it was, she brushed it off, physically shaking her head to herself. She set down her tea, slouching back in her seat — Hedwig had already moved to the backrest, tucking in to nap — her arms loosely crossed over her stomach, stared at Hermione flat and almost stern. "You shouldn't call me that."

Hermione's mouth went dry. She drained the rest of her cup, but it didn't really help. They would have gotten to this conversation eventually, she knew that, she just...really didn't want to. "Why not?"

"You know why, Hermione. I'm not Elizabeth Potter anymore. I haven't been for a long time."

There wasn't any doubt about that. She had already known, if the woman in the Ministry really was Beth — which had now been incontrovertibly confirmed — she'd been around for a long time. People changed, with time, that was...just life. And if Beth really had been thrown back _over a thousand years_ into the past, lived through all that time... The Beth she had known should certainly be buried under the weight of a millennium of experience. A couple days ago, when Hermione had learned just _how old_ "the North Wind" supposedly was, she'd found herself pessimistic over the prospects of Beth even remembering her at all. She'd expected this, it wasn't a surprise.

Hearing it still hurt. More than she'd expected it would.

Hermione stared down at her cup, carefully breathing, in and out, trying to swallow down the tears clawing at her throat. After some seconds, she was pretty sure she could speak without her voice shaking. But she didn't look up, busying herself with pouring another cup of tea. "You are still the same person, though."

"In body, yes. In all else, not so much. You laugh, but you know it's true, I know you do."

She had let out a little snort, not really a _laugh_ , but point taken. Giving Beth a shaky little smile, Hermione said, "You're not _that_ different, Beth. I recognised you instantly when I saw you in the Atrium."

Beth raised a doubtful eyebrow. "You'd be the only one, then, that I know of." Her head tilting a little, frowning, "How?"

"It was..." She paused to clear her throat, take a sip of tea. "I watched you taunt Malfoy and Lestrange downstairs, and only a few minutes later you were taunting Voldemort in the Atrium. I don't know, I just... I might not have put it together in another situation. I just thought, _I'd know that smirk anywhere_..."

"Ah, yes. It's been observed that I can't help myself but to anger people that I dislike. And it's really that distinctive?"

"Not for other people, apparently, but... Well, we did spend a lot of time together."

"I suppose..." Beth muttered, slow and drawn out, absently frowning. "Sure, nobody else has put it together, so I'm safe, I think. If people know who I used to be, there might be...uncomfortable questions." Well, that was a serious bloody understatement if Hermione had ever heard one... "Elizabeth Potter is dead, and I rather wish her to remain so."

 _That_ hurt to hear too, Hermione had to take a moment to breath again. "Were you that unhappy, before? I mean, I always thought..." She'd never thought Beth was particularly _well_ , of course — her relatives were bloody _awful_ , and there was always _something_ making life difficult for her. The moments Beth _had_ seemed happy were practically miraculous, all things considered. But, Hermione had thought... Well, if nothing else, she hadn't thought Beth was _completely_ miserable...

Beth let out a sigh, her eyes tipping to the ceiling for a second. " _Sæta stelpan_ , I don't _remember_ , before. If I'm to be her, people will expect things of me I can't give them. I simply don't remember enough."

Okay. Ow. She looked back down to the table again, furiously blinking tears out of her eyes, trying not to—

There was a hissing from across the table — not actually parseltongue, Hermione thought, just cursing under her breath. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have come here."

"Why not?" Her voice came out embarrassingly thin and wavering, shite, she didn't want to out and start crying right now, come on...

"I don't like hurting people who don't deserve it. This was a mistake."

"No, it..." Hermione took another long breath, chased it down with another gulp of tea, the warmth helping to loosen her throat a bit. "Would you rather I thought you were really dead?"

Beth was silent for a couple seconds, blankly staring. "Good point. I hate this."

Well, that made two of them. "Do you—" Hermione's voice failed her, dropping to a hoarse gasp only a couple words in, she had to take a moment to gather herself again. It took some seconds of struggling against her own damn chest to get it out — she had to ask this question, but part of her _really_ didn't want to know. "Do you remember me at all?"

"I wrote a lot."

Hermione blinked. "What?"

"Those first few years, I wrote a lot. About what was happening then, but a lot about my life before my little accident—" Apparently Beth had never lost her gift for understatement, a _little accident_ , _really_... "—whatever came to mind. _Mourning in prose_ , Wynn used to call it. It's a habit I never really got out of, I have hundreds and hundreds of pages stored away of me just rambling away about anything and everything.

"You know the feeling, when you can't remember something on your own, but once you hear of it or read of it you do?" Beth waited for Hermione to give her a twitchy nod. "Well, it's like that. Unprompted, ask me to speak of my first time through the Nineteen Nineties, I can't tell you much, but if something reminds me... I went back to my old notes on this time, back around the turn of the century, and I've kept up, I remember more than I did. But a lot of that is but...something I read. I remember some things, and the rest are nothing more than words on a page."

That didn't make it easier to breathe. Hermione didn't speak, staring down at her tea, focused on controlling herself — though she _had_ noticed Beth hadn't actually answered the question.

Either Beth had noticed Hermione noticing that, or she simply hadn't been done speaking yet. "I never did completely forget you, though the... It's not much, what I remember. Before I checked my notes a few decades ago, I knew Helminán — and no, I have no idea how _Hermione_ became _Helminán_ — was my closest friend back when I lived in the future, that she was the most intelligent and kindest person I knew at the time, and perhaps the most talented wizard around." Wait, _wizard?_ "Also, a much better person than me, morally-speaking, though not above a bit of ruthlessness now and again — did you _really_ set Severus on fire when you were twelve?"

She had, she really, _really_ had. Swallowing down the tears threatening to bubble up — the particular things Beth _had_ remembered about her after a millennium apart were _not_ helping — she croaked out, "In my defence, I thought he was cursing your broom."

Beth slowly shook her head, but not really in a _disapproving_ way, a smirk twisting her lips. "I'm certain he knows it was you, by the way. Severus is a mind mage — he can feel the presence of people around him, and he gets enough direction from it he knows you cast the fire spell."

"...Oh." That was an...uncomfortable thought. It'd been rather terrifying, setting _Professor Snape's_ robes on fire — even if the magical flames in question were completely harmless, she could hold them in her bare hand without hurting herself — she'd spent a couple weeks afterward waiting for the other shoe to drop. He'd never said or done anything, or even really looked at her funny (at least, not more than usual), so she'd assumed she'd gotten away with it. She kind of wanted to ask why he'd, just, ignored a Gryffindor student _setting him on fire_ , but she doubted Beth had actually spoken to him about it. Instead she said, "Why are you using his first name?" Because, that was sort of weird too...

One of her eyebrows ticked up, surprised by the question. "I _do_ know him. We met back in the war. I helped run safehouses and sneak muggleborns and their families out of the country — I didn't turn up to _all_ of the meetings for Dumbledore's little vigilante social club, but I was around."

 _Vigilante social club_ , honestly, Beth... Though, Hermione guessed that to someone who'd once fought in large-scale mixed muggle-magical battles, and a literal revolution on at least one occasion, the Order of the Phoenix probably came off like bumbling amateurs — _Hermione_ was still skeptical, and she didn't even really know that much. "How happy were they to have a literal _Gemeenschoppist_ joining them?"

"Oh, not at all!" Beth chirped with a gleeful smirk. "Dumbledore is practical enough to take what help he can get, most of the time, but the others, not so much. Alastor tossed a curse the instant he spotted me at my first meeting."

Somehow, she wasn't really surprised.

"As I was saying. A thousand years is a long time. And I forgot what you look like." Oh, so they were back on this topic — also, _ouch_. "I had the vague feeling your hair was impossible, but... The first time there was a photo of you in the _Prophet_ , back in November Ninety-Four, I didn't know it was you until I read the caption. What I remembered without my notes was scattered and confused, and my journals, the memories they prompted are...incomplete. Honest, without them, by what I remembered of Helminán, I thought we were lovers."

Hermione was so surprised by that she was wrenched right out of her building misery, for a moment she could only gape back at Beth — who was just ruefully smiling, seemingly amused with herself. "Ah...no. No, we weren't."

"Yeah, my journals already corrected me on that one."

"Honestly, I didn't even know you were a lesbian until I found a summary of your history in a book last week." If there was a faint note of accusation in that... Okay, it might not be fair, but Hermione...kind of thought Beth would have told her. Maybe she just hadn't known herself yet, but...

"I still think that's a silly word. I never set foot on Lesbos." Beth frowned a little, her head tilting. "Random question, but do you I know if I was a virgin when I left?"

Because she'd spent centuries assuming Hermione had been her first, apparently. Trying to ignore the warmth on her cheeks, she said, "I– God, Beth, um... I think so? If you, er, were ever with anyone, you didn't tell me...but you also never told me you liked girls, so. I don't _think_ you ever even had a girlfriend, though."

"Mm." Smirking a little again, Beth said, "I still think it's silly how shamefast people these days are about love and sex."

"Yes, well, I guess that's Christianisation for you." The book she'd found had claimed the infamous immortal storm-walker who was Beth (somehow, amazingly), had still been referred to as a pagan centuries after there hadn't really been any around anymore — though Hermione didn't know whether this was because she'd converted to a pre-Christian religion at some point or just wasn't religious at all, commentators at the time might not have recognised the difference.

Shaking her head, "Christians didn't used to be so bad about it. But no matter. My point is, if I don't truly remember _you_ , then clearly there isn't much of the girl who was Elizabeth Potter left to me."

The implication being that her friendship with Hermione was one of the most important things about Beth, and if she didn't remember it she wasn't really Beth at all anymore — her eyes stinging, Hermione bit her lip, struggling to keep her breath even, her chest burning with the effort.

"I'm not opposed to striking up some kind of friendship. But it will be a different one — your Beth is gone, and she's not coming back. If you want to do this, we will be starting from scratch. Or as nearly so."

"And you would want to..." She took another slow breath, swallowed down whatever the hell that was crawling up her throat. "I mean, you're... And I'm only sixteen, and still in school..."

Beth smiled, a little rueful. "Hermione, I'm over eleven _hundred_ years old. I'm much older than _literally everybody_ I spend much time around these days. The gulf of experience between us is not that much different than the gulf of experience between me and someone like, say, _Albus Dumbledore_. Saying you're still in school as though the couple years between now and then should mean anything to me is really very silly, when you think about it.

"Besides, I'm convinced there's a... I know other very long-lived people, some much older than me, and I think maturity has a cutoff. I think it's how the human brain works, that even if you live for centuries upon centuries, you're not that different from any other adult. Some grow sad and tired, yes, but those are often the ones that isolate themselves — it's not healthful, sitting back and watching the centuries pass a body by. I don't think a healthy person in their second millennium is _truly_ that different from one in their fourth decade. If you follow my meaning."

...Yes, Hermione was pretty sure she did. Basically, Beth was trying to say that, from her own perspective, _everybody_ around her seemed like inexperienced children, and, from Hermione's perspective, there should be little practical difference between having a friend in her thirties and one who was literally _eleven hundred_.

Which there _might_ be a point to that, Hermione thought. Whatever Beth had done to preserve herself through all this time — she couldn't be _naturally_ immortal, she must have done something — would have needed to preserve her brain as well, so while she hadn't aged _physically_ she also shouldn't have aged _neurologically_. And, the brain was only made up of so much stuff, it could only maintain so much information at once. While it would make sense for the personality of someone like Beth to drift over time, as they learned new skills and old experiences were replaced with newer ones, that maximum threshold didn't change, creating a sort of mental age ceiling. She... _thought_ that might make sense. Maybe.

No matter how wild it was to think that people who had been alive for _multiple millennia_ might just be...ordinary people. _Very_ powerful, perhaps — mages slowly grew more powerful as they cast magic, and while there _were_ diminishing returns it never really stopped. But otherwise? They were just...people. Which was kind of...

Of course, Hermione didn't really have any friends in their _thirties_ either, but...

They'd drained the tea, and she kind of wanted more, if only to have a warm liquid on hand to help keep her throat clear and to have something to do with her hands. Once she had it started, waiting for the water to boil, Hermione turned back to her guest, forcing a smile onto her face — she probably looked horrid, as long as she'd been _barely_ not crying, but she couldn't do anything about that. "So. What am I to call you, then?"

She smiled — of course, _she_ still looked perfectly fine, because this hadn't been nearly as hard for her as it was for Hermione. " _Á eyjamál, Lilja Strónseyjarinnar_. In English, Liliana Caphira. Friends call me Lilly."

"Lilly. You know, that's your mother's name." They weren't pronounced the same — it sounded vaguely French to Hermione's ears, _lili_ , long _ee_ sounds — but she assumed they were the same name.

"I didn't do that on purpose," _Lilly_ said, shrugging a little. " _Elizabeth_ sounded off to people back then, settled on _Lísbet_." That sounded different too, as though spelled with a V. "Then that became _Lilibet_ ," pronounced with a B again, "or _Lise_ , depending on who I was talking to. _Lise_ then became _Lisa_ — my family and most American governments call me Lisa — and when I returned to Europe _Lilibet_ was traded for _Liliana_. Back in Orkney, that became _Lilja_ , or _Lilly_. And anyway, I didn't notice at first, I thought my mother's name was Susana."

So, _Elizabeth_ had become _Lily_ , after passing through a thousand years and three or four languages. Wild. "I'm pretty sure that means 'lily' in Hebrew."

"Sure, but they don't sound alike. I don't know how that happened. I didn't know I had it wrong until I met her at an Order meeting."

Hermione blinked. "You met your mother?"

Nodding, she said, "A few times. My father too. Of course, they didn't know who I was."

"Of course." She imagined that could be awkward to explain. "What was that like?"

"Mostly odd. I didn't remember anything about them, and... Odd, it was odd." Hermione was returning to the table then, Lilly waited for her to refill her teacup before she added, "And she was completely mad."

Pouring her own cup, Hermione twitched with surprise hard enough she spilled a little, sloshing over into the saucer. "What?"

Lilly was smirking at her, eyes almost shimmering in the steam lifting from her cup cradled just in front of her face. (No sugar again.) "My mother. She was a psychopath, I believe the word is."

...She couldn't _really_ be serious, could she? This was _Lily Potter_ they were talking about. "Really."

"Oh, yes. She could play at being a normal person well enough, but she wasn't, truly. And the act was starting to fray after a few months fighting in earnest — it's difficult to pretend to be something you're not when you're exhausted and coming off contact euphoria." At the look that must be on her face, Lilly added, "Contact euphoria? Sometimes, getting too close to big, powerful magics can mess with your head a bit. It's not _bad_ , it feels great, but it's... Well, like getting high on magic, I guess." Frowning, her accent slipping a little thicker, she drawled, "Don't they teach no proper witchcraft up at the Valley no more?"

"Um..." It took a moment for Hermione to wrench herself around to the question — Lily Potter was... Well, people talked about her like she was a bloody _saint_ , or something. All nice to people all the time, top of her class at Hogwarts, never getting a single detention or anything, entered the fight against the Death Eaters on strength of moral principle. The implication was usually that she was a healer or something like that...despite the fact that she'd _definitely_ dueled the Dark Lord himself on two occasions, one time on her own, and survived. The bit about her sacrificing her life on Hallowe'en '81 always came off almost disturbingly religious to Hermione, it was uncomfortable. The idea that this Light paragon might have been _nothing_ like the image of her that'd been memorialised was...

Well, honestly, it wasn't a surprise at all, given the ridiculous stories people told themselves about Beth all the time. It was still just a weird thought.

"Witchcraft, potions and enchanting are witchcraft, right? And divination too, I think. Hogwarts has classes in all of those, though our Divination Professor is a sodden fraud. And your mother was different _how_ , exactly?"

Lilly scowled a little partway through, Hermione wasn't sure at what, the expression clearing a moment later. "To quote Sirius Black: _Evans is a cold, heartless bitch, but as long as she's cursing the Prick Lord and his idiot flunkies, I'm not complaining_." Well, that _did_ sound a little like something Sirius would say... " _Also, hot as hell, but Blacks don't stick it in crazy — except for when we're fucking our own cousins, of course_." Okay, that sounded _a lot_ like something Sirius would say. "I liked her, but the same people Lily made uncomfortable didn't like me either. I think I might have gotten some of my quirks from her. Are these things heritable? I don't know. And our dueling styles are even a little similar, which I think is funny.

"And, witchcraft." She huffed a little, her eyes tipping to the ceiling for a second. "Things you do with your own magic, these are wizardry. Mostly, this is done with a wand, or another device of the like, but can be done without. Exploiting magic that exists in other things and the land, the world around you, and shaping it, this is witchcraft. Potions, enchanting, and divination are witchcraft, yes, but also ritual, magics of mind, blood, and soul, magics conducted by music or dance or oaths exchanged. Elemental magics. Magics of families or places, living things or the land itself. The _big_ magics, these are almost all witchcraft."

"Oh." She'd _heard of_ some of those, of course — which she guessed explained why Lilly had called her a _wizard_ before, she guessed, she didn't do much witchcraft — though in the case of blood and soul magics mostly just because most forms of them were illegal. Ritual magic was likewise banned in most modern magical countries. She hadn't known it was possible to do magic through music or dance, and she didn't know what some of that stuff at the end meant. Magic of families, some purebloods had spoken of such things before, but she'd always assumed, well, that it was more of their supremacist nonsense about how these old families are better than everyone else, she hadn't really been paying attention... "Like storm-walkers, that's elemental magic."

Lilly nodded. "Anybody can do it, but if you don't have the talent you need to use workarounds. Rituals, potions. You know, muggles can do witchcraft."

" _What?!"_

"Sure," she said, face splitting with a broad smirk, green eyes almost twinkling. "There are many magics that don't need power from the user. How many potions do you know need anything from you? Muggles can do ritual. Muggles can do enchanting. Muggles can do all kinds of things."

"But..." There was no way... She'd never _heard_ of muggles being able to do any kind of magic at all! Supposedly, there was some magic they _couldn't even see!_ "But, I thought even squibs can't use enchanted devices like..." Hermione trailed off at the cold, sharp glare Lilly was giving her — the air in the room seemed to thin, yet at once clench around her, she completely forgot how to breathe. It was too cold, the temperature abruptly dropping, unseen energy seeming to crackle around her head.

"There is _no such thing_ as a squib." Lilly held her glare for another second or two before her face finally softened — the air in the room softened too, rising a few degrees, Hermione could breathe again. She reached for another biscuit with a slightly shaky hand, trying to hide how rattled she was. (She shouldn't have, but she'd almost forgotten this wasn't just Beth, that the woman across the table from her was ancient and powerful and _very dangerous_ , it was unnerving.) "Sometimes, a child born to mages will have no magic of their own. They can't do _wizardry_ , but all the magic of the world will hear them if they but call for it. And people these days are ashamed of this — to cast their own children so—

"Oh, shite, did I go scary on you?"

"Maybe a little bit," Hermione admitted, a little sheepishly — though she didn't know what _she_ had to feel sheepish about.

Lilly rubbed at her left temple with two fingers for a moment, letting out a thick sigh. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. Sometimes I get..."

"Protective. I know." Now that she'd had a couple seconds to think about it, that cold, merciless glare was very similar to the one Beth gave bullies sometimes. She'd seen someone be given it on her behalf plenty of times — it was Beth's usual reaction whenever someone called her a mudblood. (Interestingly, Beth didn't seem to mind nearly as much when she herself was called filthy names, just other people.) Hermione had never seen it directed at herself before, though.

Also, Beth hadn't been able to make the air around her cold and _terrifying_ just by glaring hard enough.

"Yes," Lilly said, giving Hermione a faintly surprised look. Then she straightened a little, clearing her throat. "I _truly_ hate the Statute of Secrecy, and what it did to our world. And sometimes I get carried away. I'm sorry for going scary."

"It's okay." Or it was _mostly_ okay, anyway — it had been frightening, but it wasn't like she thought Lilly might actually hurt her. " _Go scary_?"

Lilly's lips twitched. "That's what Ik'ay calls it. Well, she doesn't speak English, but that's what it means."

"Ikay?" Oh, she was _not_ pronouncing that right.

"My granddaughter. I mean, my great-...great-granddaughter? There might be another _great_ , I forget."

...Beth had _grandchildren_. Of course, Hermione had already known she did, the thought was just...surreal. "You, er...you forget?"

Lilly shrugged. "After a couple generations, there are too many of them — remembering how many steps there are between us is unnecessary and also impossible. I try to keep track of which of my children they're descended from, but other than that. Ik'ay is from Yaxak'u, but I can't remember how many generations down.

"You are an only child, yes? I confess I can't remember."

Sudden random subject change, but alright. "Ah, yes, but— I'm sorry, what was your wife's name? The book I found mentioned her several time but never said a damn thing about her, it was very irritating." At an unreadable flicker of _something_ crossing Lilly's face, Hermione added, "If it's a sensitive topic, you don't have to talk about it." She _was_ dead now, after all — and if _that_ wasn't a surreal thought, Beth had had a family and everything and her partner and probably all of her children had died before Hermione had even been born... "I was just curious..."

"No, I'm fine. I was only thinking, we weren't married. Or, sort of, I guess — a few American governments recognised our family in particular, but the legal situation was a little complicated. It wasn't allowed back then."

Because same-sex marriage _was_ legal in a lot of places in the magical world, apparently. Hermione had looked it up, and it was _very_ common, Britain was actually somewhat unusual in Europe for not allowing it. "You were together for decades and raised a family together — as far as I'm concerned, I don't care if your marriage was legally recognised or not, that's still what I'm going to call it."

One of Lilly's eyebrows ticked up. "More like a century, but good point." She set down her tea cup, blankly stared at for an instant, just long enough for the hesitation to be noticeable. "Nelinha. It wasn't the name her mother gave her, but... Well, people liked to go forcing Christian names on their slaves — made it easier for them to say they were civilising the savages, you see. She believes her parents were Igbo, but she grew up speaking Portuguese."

Hermione kind of wanted to ask after Nelinha's story — a muggleborn of enslaved African parents who'd managed to escape with magic, there _had_ to be an interesting story there — but she wasn't sure how Lilly would respond to that, so. "Yaxaku definitely isn't a Portuguese name." Also, Hermione was certain she'd pronounced it wrong.

"Yaxak'u, and no, it's Ch'orti'. Our home is in Mískitu lands, but there wasn't a magical community in the area. The best options were to go west to the Ch'orti', southwest to the Lenka, or southeast to the Ngäbe — and I had the best relationship with the Ch'orti'. We gave our children Ch'orti' names and raised them to speak and read Ch'orti', celebrated Ch'orti' holidays and sent them to a Ch'orti' school. My grandchildren are all Ch'orti' or Q'eqchi' or K'iche' now."

There was absolutely _no_ hope of Hermione pronouncing any of those last three correctly — she wasn't even certain how Lilly had gotten her throat to pull off that second one. "I don't think I'm familiar with any of those names."

Lilly smiled, shaking her a head a little. "Maya, Hermione. They're Maya."

"Oh! Right, sorry."

"No matter. You may want to get Ik'ay's name right, though."

"That was the granddaughter you mentioned, right? Is she in Britain with you?"

Lilly nodded. "She's a storm-walker, her parents asked me to teach her. I'm handling her magical education, but she'll still need to go to school for everything else. I haven't figured that out yet, I'll have to talk to someone in the Aquitanian government."

Hermione had already opened her mouth to ask why Aquitania when the answer abruptly occurred to her — Aquitania, a magical nation corresponding to southern France and eastern Spain, had been allied with Grindelwald, so they were more likely to be willing to deal with _Colonel Lili_. But she did wonder, "Why can't you just send her to a British school?"

"She doesn't speak English, Hermione. Her Spanish is passable, but sticking her in an English classroom is a _terrible_ idea."

"Oh, right, you did say that a bit ago, that makes sense." Most of the muggleborns the Mayan magical nations would get would be Spanish-speaking, it must be a large minority language over there. "Er, was it Ikay?"

Lilly's lips twitched. "Ik'ay."

...That _barely_ sounded any different from what she'd said. "... _ee-kuh-eye_?"

"Two syllables — Ik'ay. You need to push it out harder than that. _Tah, t'ah; kah, k'ah. Ik'ay_." Lilly drilled her on the name a few times, and eventually Hermione got it... _sort of_ right. It still felt _weird_ , she kept trying to stick a schwa in the middle of what was apparently supposed to be a single consonant sound, but Lilly finally nodded in acceptance. "That'll do. Ik'ay will know you're trying to say her name, at least. Do you know any Spanish?"

"Ah, I understand it better than I speak it. I'm fluent in French, and some of the words are similar enough I keep slipping."

"Oh yes, that can happen — I get K'iche' and Q'eqchi' awful mixed up all the time. They can usually tell what I'm trying to say, at least. Anyway, what of your family? I think you said you're an only child..."

Somehow, they managed to talk about Hermione's family for quite a while. Starting with her parents, of course. Hermione tried to move on after just a few basic statements, but Lilly kept asking after things, so they ended up lingering over it _far_ longer than she'd expected — honestly, Hermione didn't think she'd ever talked to someone about her family this much in her entire life. Stuff about her parents, yes, which had been a bit awkward. Lilly had looked surprised that she'd been left home alone so much growing up, so Hermione had asked about it. Apparently, that had been the whole point of extended families living together, so there'd always be _someone_ around to take care of the children — in cases there weren't, rich people had servants and the like, and for poorer people there were neighbours, or cousins down the street or something, there was always _someone_. The idea of leaving a child in a (relatively) big house all alone was clearly strange to her.

Apparently, Lilly felt the nuclear family was _doing it wrong_ , which was sort of funny.

(Less amusing, she thought Hermione's parents were neglectful — she didn't _say_ it, but Hermione could tell she was thinking it.)

And even after her parents, they kept going. There wasn't much to say about her mother's family — Mum was an only child, and her cousins were scattered all across the country, they hardly knew each other at all — but Dad's family was, well, _very French_. Hermione told a few stories about her grandmother and Aunt Tienne, since Lilly just kept asking, and she really didn't know what else to do. At least it wasn't a totally boring subject, she guessed. Hermione's grandmother had had an interesting life — she'd been maybe eight or nine when she'd run way from an orphanage and ended up stowing away on a boat to _sneak across the Channel to England_ , because she'd heard the war was going badly and the Nazis sounded scary, and that was just the _beginning_ — and Tienne could be funny, though spending much time with her in person was just exhausting. So it wasn't a bad thing, really.

It was just...kind of weird? She didn't know if anyone had ever asked her about her family before, she hardly even knew what to say.

Somehow, Hermione wasn't sure exactly how, they ended up talking about classical literature. She was both surprised that Lilly _had_ actually read some of the big names, and also unsurprised that there were a lot she hadn't. It didn't help that she'd apparently never caught up on English-language literature after spending a couple centuries with American mages, she'd missed the 18th and 19th Centuries entirely. (Hermione was disappointed to learn she'd also missed Shakespeare, she couldn't put the original performances in a pensieve for her.) The most memorable part, Lilly mentioned she'd _actually met John Milton_ — she'd read a couple of his political tracts, but none of his poetry, and mostly just remembered him because he'd been an arse to her. Well, the vocabulary _Lilly_ had used had been...more _colourful_ than that, involving genitalia and unpleasant substances, and also a few words in some foreign language she assumed were _very_ vulgar, the point was they hadn't gotten on. (Hermione hadn't been able to hold in a shocked laugh at her impression of _John bloody Milton_ , because _really_ , Beth?!)

Lilly actually liked epic poetry, apparently, though most of it was old stuff that had been lost in the intervening centuries (but still existed buried deep within certain magical libraries), or works by Gaelic and Scandinavian mages Hermione had never heard of. Things she _had_ heard of were mostly just Chaucer. Hermione knew Reynard the Fox was a thing, she'd just never read any of the stories Lilly mentioned (and certainly not in _the original medieval Dutch_ , Jesus Christ). She even name-dropped a couple weirder ones, like _Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen_ , which sounded vaguely familiar but Hermione knew nothing about, a bunch of titles in various foreign languages that were _entirely_ unfamiliar...

And somehow she'd never gotten around to reading _Paradise Lost_? She was avoiding it entirely because she hadn't liked the author, wasn't she?

Of course, as much as Hermione might tease Lilly for never having read _totally very important literature, honest_ — and how does someone get to be _eleven hundred years old_ without _ever reading Shakespeare_ ( _I realise plays aren't supposed to be_ read _, Lilly, that's not the point!)_ — but she was far more pleased than she was pretending to be. She meant, she didn't think she'd _ever_ had a conversation like this with a friend before, about...well, nerdy things, she guessed. Her parents were _massive_ bookworms, so she'd read all kinds of things, at a much younger age than people usually got to them, and...

She loved Beth and Ron and Ginny and everyone, yes, but a lot of their interests just didn't overlap. Getting to talk to someone about this stuff who _wasn't_ one of her parents was a new experience, and it, well...

It was fun? She realised how that sounded, that she was _having fun_ talking about _epic poetry_ that'd been written _hundreds of years ago_ , but it just _was_ , okay.

Eventually, Hermione had entirely lost track of the time, Lilly leaned back in her chair, letting out a long sigh. The movement disturbed Hedwig, feathers ruffling as she woke up from her nap. "It's nigh time I leave, I think. If I forget to feed Ik'ay, her parents be very annoyed with me."

Hermione's lips twitched. "Yes, that's the same reason my mother didn't let me get a cat when I was five."

"Mm. There are neighbours who can look after her if I'm gone too long, even so. Also, your parents must be getting home before too much longer, and I doubt you want to try explaining me."

She winced — that was a _very_ good point.

They cleaned up quick, dishes and cups and such squared away. Lilly cleaned them all with a flick of her fingers — bending ambient magic to form the spell, would register as low-level 'accidental' magic to the monitoring enchantments the Ministry used, which was _cheating_ — so they could be put right back in the cabinet, convenient. Hedwig hopped back up onto Lilly's shoulder, and they were heading for the front door, Lilly rambling about how the British Ministry detected magic and the myriad ways to get around the rules...

"Hermione?"

They'd stopped just inside the front door, Lilly turned back toward her, a wary sort of look on her face Hermione couldn't read. "I'm sorry, what?"

Lilly hesitated, just for a second. Her eyes tilted to the side a bit, a very faint wince crossing her face, brief and mild enough Hermione wasn't certain it'd really been there at all. Lips twitching with a weak smile, she said, "I'm not going away, Hermione."

"Oh!" She had been wondering if she would ever see Lilly again, if she'd just walk out the door and that would be it, but she hadn't realised she'd... Well, that she'd been worried about it badly enough that Lilly could tell something was wrong. She had been mildly distracted, but... "I'm sorry, I wasn't— I mean, I know that."

"It's okay. I know all this is...that it will take getting used to. But I don't plan on going anywhere. I don't mean I'll be around all the time, obviously, but I'm not _leaving_."

She _was_ leaving, really, in many of the ways that mattered. It wasn't like Beth would be coming back to school, or... Talking to _Lilly_ for she wasn't sure how long about Voldemort and her grandchildren and Hermione's family and bloody _epic poetry_ had, in a way, only rubbed it in further that this _wasn't Beth_ , not really. She... She would deal with that, it was just...not easy.

But she didn't want to force the issue, bring up all that just as Lilly had to leave — and probably end up crying again. She forced a smile, weak and shaky. "I know. You do have a particularly ugly bug to squish, after all."

"Yes." Lilly didn't look convinced. Which, when Hermione thought about it, she hadn't really expected her to be. Beth always had had a knack for knowing when people were lying to her — she hadn't expected an extra _eleven hundred years_ of practice to somehow make her _worse_ at it. After a moment of uncomfortable staring, Lilly let out a thin sigh, sounding slightly exasperated. "I'll be a busy a couple days now, so, Friday?"

"What?"

Lilly smiled, warm and faintly amused. "You've welcomed me into your home. It's only fair I welcome you into mine."

...Oh. Hermione _really_ hadn't expected that, she'd thought... She didn't know. "Ah, sure? I mean, I'm not doing anything, I don't think, yes, um. I should probably dress for warmth, right? Stronsay is pretty far north, it's probably cold..."

"Compare to Oxfordshire? I guess. Mostly, it's very windy — the isle is flat and there aren't any trees, the breeze off the sea flies one end to the other. Our wards cut it down, a little, and I'm growing the only orchard on the northern isles for centuries now, but yes, you may be cold."

"You have an orchard...in the _Orkneys_."

"Sure," Lilly chirped, grinning. "I've apple and cherry, rowan, maythorn and blackthorn and hawthorn, and under them I have roses and..." She trailed off, frowning a little. "Shite, I forget the words in English. _Týtuber ok mjölber_. _Ok múltuber líka_ , when I'm lucky."

"...Isn't it too cold and rocky up there for _half_ of these things to grow?" Not that she was even certain what half of those were supposed to be...

Lilly's grin split wider. " _Magic_ , Hermione." Oh, well, obviously... "I'll be here a little before midday. I'll feed you, so."

"Okay, sure." Beth had been a great cook before, and there was another thing Hermione didn't expect she'd gotten worse at after eleven hundred years of practice. Not that Beth had really _liked_ to do it much — she'd had to do the cooking back with her awful relatives, she didn't like being reminded — but Sirius was completely bloody hopeless in a lot of ways, so the couple summers and holidays she'd lived with him she'd needed to take care of it if she didn't want to live completely off takeaway. It was kind of funny, when Hermione and the Weasleys stayed with them this last summer and over Christmas, Beth and Missus Weasley kept bumping into each other and getting into weird arguments, Beth later complaining to her in private about the woman being _such a bossy bitch in_ _ **my fucking kitchen**_...

Hermione swallowed, forced herself to concentrate, to not let her head wander down pointless paths that would just end with her trying not to cry again. Right. Going to Lilly's house, Friday, for lunch. She wondered if she should maybe ask what Lilly planned on making. She _had_ spent who knew how long as basically a bloody _viking_ — she'd been a _literal pirate for centuries_ , Hermione still had to ask what the hell had been up with that — and a lot of Scandinavian cuisine could be a bit...weird. Scottish food often wasn't great to begin with, and she'd just been living with American Indian mages for a couple centuries, and Hermione couldn't even guess what they ate like, and—

And suddenly Lilly was _very_ close, and she...kissed her cheeks, one and then the other.

...What?

Lilly was saying something, but Hermione was too shocked to really pick up on it. Before she could figure out what the hell just happened, Lilly was out the door, and she was gone.

Blinking to herself, Hermione stared out the open door for several seconds before remembering to close it. She stumbled back, plopped down onto the bench shortly inside, blankly gazing at the wall.

Beth _hated_ being touched.

It had taken Hermione a little while to notice — though, really, not nearly as long as seemingly everybody else. They hadn't _talked_ about it until halfway through third year, but she'd already figured it out long before then. It was that conversation, when... Actually, Hermione suspected that talk had only happened in the first place because she'd suspected Beth and Ron were dating (which was very stupid in retrospect), and had asked... Whatever, not important. Beth had admitted that the first time she remembered someone hugging her _ever_ had been Hermione, saying goodbye before leaving for Christmas first year. And, yes, Hermione had noticed something had been wrong at the time, but she hadn't thought...

She was fine with Hermione and Ron, and _sometimes_ Sirius, but she really preferred to avoid it if at all possible. Before the Yule Ball, when they'd had that extremely awkward dancing lesson with most of Gryffindor, McGonagall had ended up giving Beth a detention because she'd flat-out refused to participate, but it usually wasn't a problem. It was just something she talked about in private, about how terribly uncomfortable it made her, and was it _really_ so much to ask for people to just not touch her without asking first, _Jesus_...

Honestly, it was bad enough, and Beth was awkward enough trying to talk about it, that more than once Hermione had had the unsettling thought that...well, that her uncle might have...done something. She didn't _think_ so, not really, but... Hermione never had worked up the nerve to ask, and now she would probably never know.

Beth was never the one to initiate anything, and when someone else did she was always tense and awkward and obviously uncomfortable. She _certainly_ didn't go around cheek-kissing like, like... Well, like one of Hermione's aunts, she guessed — the _French_ ones. It was...

It _wasn't Beth_.

 _She_ wasn't Beth. Not really. She _had_ been, once, but that had been such a long time ago...

Hermione _had_ known that, of course, but it was still... She'd known it, something she'd read out of a book, that she _understood_ , but she hadn't _known_ it known it, something she _felt_. It was odd, for this to be the thing to tip her over into it feeling all too _real_ , but...

Beth was gone. She was never coming back.

Hermione drew in a long breath, thick and shaky. And she forced herself to her feet, turned back toward the library, forcing this... _all_ of this into the back of her head where she didn't have to deal with it. There wasn't anything she could do about it, there was no use sitting here crying about it when she still had summer homework to do. She really should get that out of the way before she got distracted.

She suspected she was going to be very busy this summer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _There's some linguistic fuckery going on in the berries Lilly listed off. When she says_ [maythorn and blackthorn and hawthorn] _, those are respectively: 1, hawthorn, due to Lilly forgetting the proper English word and smashing together Scots "mey" (which technically only refers to the flowers) and Icelandic "þyrnar"; 2, this one is correct, also called sloe; 3, sea buckthorn, also called sandthorn. In fact, Lilly's confusion is because of sandthorn/hawthorn: the Scandinavian term for sandthorn happens to be a cognate for English hawthorn (Icelandic "hafþyrnir", Swedish/Danish "havtorn"), so she blanked trying to think of what the fuck the word was — because "hawthorn" was_ definitely _what sea buckthorn is called, so that couldn't possibly be right..._ xD
> 
>  _[Týtuber ok mjölber_. _Ok múltuber líka]_ — _Here I go playing with a language I don't actually speak again. This should be "lingonberry and bearberry, and also cloudberry", but I don't speak Icelandic so that use of "líka" might be off. Also, I couldn't find an Icelandic word for bearberry, annoyingly, so I made one up. From Norwegian "melbær" and Swedish "mjölon", I decided that should probably be "mjölber". If there actually is a proper word I couldn't find, just assume Lilly's obscure magical dialect is different._
> 
>  _Oh, by the way, this was recently explained in a different fic but I never did it here, whoops. There are Norse-speaking communities in magical Britain, particularly in Shetland and Orkney (and also the Hebrides, Caithness, and Sutherland, though fading in favour of Gaelic these days). These dialects are Insular Scandinavian — descended from western Old Norse, related to Icelandic and Faroese. In real life, a Norse language_ did _survive in Orkney/Shetland for centuries, only dying out in the 19th Century. That dead language is called Norn, so I'll be using the same term for convenience. (I did use the term at least once already, in the previous chapter.)_
> 
>  _Technically, the Insular Scandinavian dialects spread all over the place_ should _have diverged into different languages by now, but that's_ far _too much effort for me to actually come up with for a fanfic. So I just use Icelandic to stand in for all of them._
> 
>  _This is what Lilly was referring to when she said_ [eyjamál] _, by the way — literally "island-speech"._
> 
>  _Yes, I realise I think about this shit_ way _too hard._
> 
> * * *
> 
> _This chapter was almost done already when I posted the first two, so I knocked it out quick._
> 
> _The first flashback (to the Founders' time, which does **not** go the way you expect) will actually start in the next chapter...assuming I get to it anytime soon, which I really can't guess. _ _The next chapters of Echoes and The Good War are both half done, and have been for a while, but I've been having a fucking awful time writing lately, so I can't say when I'll have them done. I'll be posting things when I post things, we'll see._
> 
> _—Lysandra_


End file.
